


RYCBAR

by Papapaldi



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, Clara faces some narrative consequences for time stream stuff and hell bent, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 120,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27778129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: "Clara Oswald died on trap street, London, 2015. Someday, Oswin will join her there."In Utah, 1994, an ancient waitress is visited by a young runaway in the night.Across time and space, fractals of the consciousness of Clara Oswald are embroiled in a repeating, cyclical war against the Great Intelligence, one that they are both destined to lose.In the Doctor’s timestream, which she was trapped in long ago, Clara glimpsed something more. An abyssal, fathomless depth pulsing with dull, purple light.Clara Oswald has been dead for thousands of years, and the woman that continues to walk in her shell is weary, bitter, and alone. Gallifrey calls.
Relationships: Clara Oswin Oswald & The Great Intelligence (Doctor Who), Clara Oswin Oswald/Eleventh Doctor, Clara Oswin Oswald/Twelfth Doctor, Eleventh Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Twelfth Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald
Comments: 20
Kudos: 28





	1. Run

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing the beginning of this ages ago but abandoned it for a while. Wanted to pick it up again as a break from writing The Modern Prometheus. As someone who was annoyed by Clara's plot line in s7 and in hell bent, I wanted to explore it a bit here and write about the consequences of those events (consequences, Moffat, I know. Wild). I also really love Clara's relationship with the Doctor, and how with Eleven there were some toxic elements there (him being obsessed with her ~mystery~ and erasing her memories at one point) but then with Twelve she really softened that 'shard of ice', as the show put it. Idk, rambling. I love them.

Trenzalore, 1847 AS (After Siege)

She is a leaf on the wind. An autumn leaf, withering from crimson to brown and crumbling away on the breeze. She is scattered, and her splinters are swept away in the gale, the torrent, the fire. The storm is a vortex of flame, and its light sparkles in her eyes like stars. It burns, but even so, a smile curls her lips. 

She knows her name, and what she has to do. She knows what she’s seeking, and what she’s meant for, and where the pieces of her are headed in the tearing current. They are heading to him, because she was born to save the Doctor. 

She crumbles until only one piece remains; the core of her, with all her echoes stripped away. The inferno spits her out, digested, and she falls to the ground. 

It seems strange, there being ground beneath such an endless descent. The dirt beneath her is damp, and with a hitched, ragged breath, she inhales petrichor. She inhales, which is surely a good sign. It means she’s still breathing. What’s more, her breath is travelling through something, a pair of lungs, a throat, a mouth. Upon placing all these connected parts, she uses them to cry out. She screams the only word that holds any clarity in her mind. 

“Doctor!” 

She doesn’t like this place. The soil is rich and black, and things crunch beneath her feet like a thousand scattered autumn leaves. Upon closer inspection, she realises they are bones, as is the brown dust coating the topsoil, ground under the feet of fellow wanderers. The sky is black too, with no hint of the fiery vortex she was falling through mere moments ago. 

She is no longer smiling, because down here she isn’t sure of anything. She doesn’t know her name, or where she’s from, or where she’s going. She wasn’t born to do anything. She’s not even sure she was born at all. 

“Doctor?” Quieter, hope fading. Tears sting her eyes. 

The sounds of gunfire and rocket blasts blare dull and muffled from some faraway battlefield. The wind carries screams along with its chill, and they echo throughout the cavernous space. 

This is where things come to die – forgotten things, pushed down from the forefront of memory and into this smoking charnel pit. That is what she is, just like the decaying bones beneath her; a memory, a life constructed from raw data and space-rot and time. This is the bottom of the abyss, there is nowhere else to go, so why is there an outcrop? 

Ahead, the ground drops off abruptly. The cliff's edge looms over a vast emptiness, distant war fires dashed across the dark. She walks towards the drop. 

At the edge, the sands beneath soften and slick to a smooth, velvety black stone. Rocks skitter from the edge, raining dust into the darkness beneath. She doesn’t hear them hit the ground. Somehow, she knows it’s bottomless, and yet there are voices whispering, hands reaching, as if something is trying to claw its way up. Her breath catches in her throat (which is good, because it means she’s still breathing, still has a throat, still alive). There’s _more_ down there, more of this place, more memories _._ Father to fall, where the dead things are deader.

If this is where things come to die, then where do the dead things go to rest? Where do memories go when they’re forgotten? 

The question grips her beating heart, a mystery worth solving. A dull, persistent light penetrates the darkness beneath, purple and rippling. She longs to touch it, because she was born to save, and born to _see._

If only she could keep her eyes open. 

She trains her gaze on the light below, drinking in the sight and, from within her head, birds begin to sing. The ground shifts below her, and in a blink, where once there was nothing now stretches a plain of arid, dark soil, and above, the chiselled underside of a great cavern. No more precipice. No more light. 

This world, this hell, is editing itself, correcting itself, because something’s coming. Whatever it is, it’s not supposed to be here, it’s _really_ not supposed to be here. She feels that simple fact like a deep ache in her bones, toes to teeth. When is a timestream not a timestream? Perhaps, she thinks, when it drowns the very thing it once flowed through. Paradox on paradox, purple on purple.

The Doctor is here. 

Her limbs become water – just a part of the stream – and she falls to a heap in the bone-riddled dust. Her eyes stay open for a moment, tears and dirt blurring her vision as the Doctor speaks, and dark figures walk past. 

Hellfire rages on the horizon, and within her; encroaching, blistering, burning like a stalwart candle flame in her chest. As she slumps, and sleeps, she is once again suspended over the edge of the abyss, mind-deep in purple light. Jagged stripes of violet are slashed in undulating strokes across a pale blue sky.

As she dreams, Clara remembers something that, according to the Doctor, she is not supposed to remember.

This seems strange to her. She isn’t supposed to have memories she can’t remember. 

More importantly, she isn’t supposed to have memories that he remembers, but she doesn’t. 

She is (was) standing on a jagged black cliff face overlooking a bottomless white void. Hair stuck to her face in sweat-soaked clumps, heat slathered upon her skin like perfume, fear tight in her chest. Behind her, in the overloading neutron reactor of the TARDIS, monsters reach and rage and scream. Her future is set in magmatic stone, banging on the porthole window, yet her present is (was) much worse. Sure, the monsters are terrifying, but Clara can deal with terrifying. She deals with terrifying every day, twice if she’s lucky. 

Terrifying is good, fear keeps her fast, but there’s more than one sort of fear. The sort that grips her now (then) keeps her rooted to the spot and drains the colour from her face despite the heat crawling through her cheeks. 

The Doctor’s eyes are cold, face rigid, jaw clenched. He mutters, gesticulating, hunched, mad. Not the usual sort of mad. There’s more than one sort of madness too. He grips her tightly by the shoulders and shakes her so hard that a gasp is forced from her lips.

“What are you, eh?” he snarls, bearing down, accusing. Afraid, though she can’t imagine why. “A trick? A trap –”

“Clara.” It’s a different Doctor talking now. The hands on her shoulders are softer, kinder, and she leans against the blackened, rotting stone of a tomb, catching her breath. “Clara, stay with me. You’re remembering things, things you shouldn’t be able to remember.” He smiles, but there’s a hint of that very same, inexplicable fear. 

“Don’t think about it,” his voice is soft, nearly whispering. “Just keep going.” In her mind, she remembers something else – a book on a pedestal in a library she’s never seen. A book about a war of time. “Come along Clara.” She obeys, against her better judgement. 

Her better judgement has been telling her to stay away from the Doctor for a long while, and she’s gotten rather good at telling it to sod off. 

In the dream, she walks toward a pillar of twisting, sparking red light. The Doctor is hunched, convulsing, screaming, dying. That is when she understands what she has to do, what she has already done. The logistics of the paradox make her head ache, but it doesn’t matter. 

_Don’t think about it_ , she tells herself. _Just keep going._

Before her, the time stream glitters; the carcass of a Time Lord, at the centre of his decaying ship, leaking dimensional energy and time-rot like petroleum. She smiles, and finds her last words waiting on her lips certain and impatient, as if she’s been waiting a very long time to say them out loud. 

“Run you clever boy, and remember me.”

...

The air pulses with a soft hum. It sounds like salt air, and cool breeze, and Clara blinks her eyes open to a pall of soft sea green. Her head is muddled – no, muddy – her thoughts sink into the swamp before she can pull them back. Her mouth tastes like ash. 

“Are you awake?” A soft voice drifts through the calm, mechanical ambiance. In the blurriness of her vision, she makes out the long, sharp shape of a man dressed in a purple waist coat, lilac sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He’s bent over a set of controls – the TARDIS controls. The Doctor. The image of him is tangled up in countless others, different faces sinking down into the swamp, forgotten. Dead. 

“Hmm,” she hums groggily, turning where she lay. She is wrapped in a dark tweed coat, one arm trailing towards the floor from her place on the metal steps. The back of her knees feel bruised and raw, and there is a matching ache around her back and underarms, like she’s been carried. Clara moves to a sitting position, careful and slow, trying to remember how her muscles work. They’re stretched and strained. She feels old. 

“I’ll take that as a yes,” The Doctor replies. There’s a smile in his tone, and on his face, but he doesn’t look at her. 

“What happened?” 

“What do you remember?”

An innocuous question, or it should be. It isn’t. Apparently, there are rules regarding this sort of thing. There are memories that she is supposed to remember, and some she is not. 

“Bits and pieces,” Clara admits, decidedly vague. “All a bit muddled.” She saw a figure standing in a cave, starry night and firelight around him; leathered, weathered, battle-worn and white. The Doctor of war. “There was a cave…”

She expects him to pay her some attention. He usually does, and she feels a bit silly when she realises just how much she likes it. He’s usually all wide-eyes and sparking energy, but now he’s cold and stiff as stone. “And?” he prompts flatly. He still won’t look at her. 

“Well, I remember falling through this red light. I felt like I was splitting apart. Then… a cave, and you were there.” A pause, collecting her thoughts, her memories. She clutches them close and counts them like pennies. “It was your time stream.” She remembers jumping into it. Born to save, born to die, born to run – but she’s still here. She’d been so sure, her life heading towards that one, branching moment. 

Clara voices her confusion. “How am I still alive?” 

“I pulled you out,” The Doctor says simply. He stares down at his hands, fiddling with machinery in a pointless pattern of flicks and flourishes. Below, the ship groans, its lights blaring sickly teal. “It was impossible, me entering my own time-stream, and you surviving it. All of it… it’s impossible.” 

An impossible feat for an impossible girl. She aims to please. Maybe, when it comes to the Doctor, she aims a little too high. She remembers what Emma Grayling told her. _Don’t trust him. There’s a shard of ice in his heart._ A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a cheery grin and far too much tweed. 

“What’s wrong?” Clara asks, knowing he won’t give her a straight answer. 

“Nothing’s wrong, what do you mean? The day is won,” the Doctor grins. He leans back on his heels and spins on the spot, his hands clapped clumsily together in the air. “Visited my own tomb and circumvented the ensuing paradox _and_ saved the universe from a thousand simultaneous collapses. But that’s all in a day’s work for the two of us, eh?” 

“Something’s bothering you,” Clara insists. Sitting up, she draws her shoulders back and tilts up her chin. For the first time since waking up, the Doctor looks at her. Clara catches a glimpse of fading violet light in his eyes. He’s forgetting things too, memories drowning in a swamp of his own. His fingers are trembling. 

The Doctor flashes her a hurried grin, and his gaze flicks swiftly away. She can see it, in the hunched line of his shoulders and the shifting of his eyes; fear. “It’s nothing, promise. I just have a lot to think about.” His grin widens, but he looks past her. 

“Where are we going?”

“Well, I was thinking... home.” The Doctor laces his fingers together, twists them up into pale knots, his slab of a jaw still clenched tight. It contrasts jarringly with his bright tone. “You’ve had a big day, I think you’ve earned a rest – besides, Angie and Archie can’t be left to their own devices, who knows what trouble the world would be in then.” He forces out the beginnings of a laugh, but it quickly dies out. 

“What will you do?”

“Oh, just take a bit of a break. Collect myself – literally, because I’m all a tad,” – he waggles his fingers absently, eyes darting around, – “scattered, so to speak. Still slotting things back into the right order,” he taps the side of his head with a finger. 

Clara fixes him with an interrogating stare; wide-eyed and unyielding. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

He furrows his thin brows. “Of course. I’m always okay.” 

The Doctor smiles at Clara, and she nods, plastering on an uneasy grin of her own. 

“Tell me Clara,” he says after a drawn-out moment, during which all that permeates the space is the ship’s quiet drone, “in the timestream, did you see… “The Doctor hangs his head, shaking it slightly.

“What?”

He doesn’t look at her. “Never mind.”

Utah, 1994

The dead waitress stands behind the bar with her arms crossed over a clean white apron. It’s been a slow day, so there’s been nothing to stain it. Most days are slow days, because people don’t tend to notice the diner. 

The coffee machine rattles and groans as it spills forth a steaming dark stream into her awaiting mug. The waitress cups it in her hands and raises it to her lips straight away. The black brew is near boiling, but the waitress doesn’t flinch. It’s a thrill to let the heat scald her tongue without the damage and lingering blistering that comes with a burn. Nothing can burn her, not anymore. The caffeine has no effect either, but it’s easy to fool the human mind. Coffee still gives her a bit of a kick, like a placebo.

Instincts are hardwired, and carried from generation to generation since the dawn of her species – instincts like flinching when you try to drink something that’s too hot. Even instincts can fade, given enough time. The waitress has lived through an awful lot of it, or perhaps none at all. It all comes down to semantics. 

The waitress drinks, and lets the heat fill her throat. She sets her mug down on the bar top behind her, its plastic polished to a glittering sheen. Wiping it down is a therapeutic act. It reminds her of home. 

The diner is all red and blue, stars and stripes, a painting of Elvis on the back wall. Red leather booths and red plastic barstools, a jukebox in the corner and tables plastered over in tacky white. A parody of America. People are often taken aback by the waitress’ accent, seeing as she’s from Blackpool. 

It’s a tourist town, so there’s a fair few diners like hers. People want to see the America they see in the movies, and eat the sort of food you can get just about anywhere in the world now anyway. The diner has come to rest in Southern Utah, though in the past, and the future, it has, will have, and is currently making its home in centre state, and to the west, and sometimes as far as Nevada. The steering is never exact. 

The people who stay here never stay for long, they pass through on their way to a more exciting attraction further down the desert roads. Maybe the locals notice the little diner that comes and goes, wheezing in the night and twisting the air with static, fizzling energy, but they don’t do anything about it. It’s part perception filter, part determination to ignore that which threatens the illusion of sanity. 

The waitress likes the nineties. These years remind her of her childhood, and she’s lived them over a few times, soaking it all in. She’s sentimental, living with a perpetual craving for the nostalgic. She’s like an old woman, alone in an empty house, looking at long-faded photographs as an anchor to who she used to be. She is an old woman, in a roundabout way. It all comes down to semantics. 

It’s been a slow day, but the nights are slower, so the waitress starts when the chime on the front door rings, announcing a customer’s arrival. She still startles, though it’s a rare thing. A persistent instinct. 

A tall, hooded figure walks cautiously over the threshold. It’s a young boy, maybe a man by legal standards, but his eyes are still wide with youth, and his figure is stretched out and gangling. The boy’s skin is dark, his shoulders hunched under the weight of an overstuffed backpack. 

“Welcome,” the waitress calls brightly. She pulls a notepad from the pocket of her cornflower blue uniform and pulls a pencil from behind her ear. “What can I get for you?” 

“Umm, hi,” the boy mumbles. He looks tired; there circles under his eyes, and his posture is tilted down towards the chequered tiles as if he were melting. “Just a… err,” – his eyes flick up to the garishly-coloured menus above the bar for half a moment – “just a coffee, thanks.”

She nods, flipping her notebook shut and stowing her pencil away. “Milk and sugar?”

“Yeah, thanks.” The boy dithers over to the bar, swinging his backpack onto the floor with a clang as the zipper strikes the metal stool leg. He winces at the noise. 

“How many sugars do you want?” 

The boy takes a moment to answer, settling himself on the stool and resting his elbows on the bar top. He turns back to her with a sheepish smile. “Err, much as I can have, I guess.”

She grins. “Good choice.” Bustling around to the other side of the bar, the waitress sets the coffee machine going again. “So, you out on your own?” 

“I’m old enough.” He jumps straight on the defensive. By trying to prove he’s not a kid, he succeeds in proving the opposite. 

“I’m sure you are,” the waitress nods, eyebrows raised in bemusement. 

“Are you British?” He asks. As for his accent, she can’t precisely pin it down. It’s American, but she can’t pick out the specifics. 

“You noticed,” the waitress says dryly. 

“Why are you working in a place like this?”

“What are you doing in a place like this?” she retorts, sharp elbows resting on the bar opposite him, chin in her hands. She gives him her best teacherly stare, the sort that’s stern with just a hint of mischief. 

The boy hesitates. “Out.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Are you running away?” She can tell immediately that she’s struck a nerve. The muscles in the bot’s neck twitch and go tense, and his eyes flick away hurriedly from her interrogating gaze. 

“No.” He adds in a scoff for good measure. 

“Yes you are.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” the waitress insists, eyebrows raised. 

The boy falters, and the waitress can see his mind working away behind his eyes, deciding whether he can trust her. The waitress softens her eyes and widens her smile into something kind instead of scrutinising. She knows vulnerable when she sees it. She used to deal with troubled kids all the time, and prided herself in being approachable. She hopes she hasn’t forgotten how. It’s been a very long time. 

“What’s in the bag?” the waitress asks. She keeps it casual, turning around to grab him a mug and placing it under the spout of the coffee machine. 

Again, he takes a moment to answer. “Just stuff.”

“A lot of stuff for a one-night trip,” she observes, feigning innocence. The waitress makes the coffee weak, and loads it with three sugars. She knows how kids are, even when they won’t admit they’re kids. 

“So,” she broaches, at the boy’s silence, “you hitchhike into town?” 

“Maybe,” he says begrudgingly, cautiously. The waitress spins around and places his coffee in front of him.

“Here you are.”

“Thanks,” he eyes her warily as he wraps his hands around the mug. 

“So, why’re you running away?” 

A beat, during which the boy glares down at his long-fingered hands where they curl around the fabric of his jumper sleeve, digging in. He can’t seem to stop fidgeting. 

“I don’t know.”

“I think you probably do.” The waitress takes a sip from her own mug, now cooled to a more pleasant temperature, though it makes no different to her. “I’m Owsin, by the way,” she tells him. An exchange of names, chosen or given, is the first step in building trust. Her buried teacher skills are coming back to her. 

“That’s not a real name,” the boy replies derisively. 

“Is too,” she insists, swallowing another sip and smacking her lips. She sets her mug down and turns back to the counter behind her. 

“I’m John,” the boy pipes up. Oswin can’t help but smile to herself. She’s getting somewhere.

“So, John, do your parents know where you are?”

Guilt twists his lips into a frown. “No.”

“They’ll be worried.”

He chuckles slightly, unsmiling, and turns his gaze down. “No they won’t.” 

Oswin presses her lips together in sympathy, a respectful pause. 

“Where are you headed?” she asks. John’s eyes dart around, never meeting her own, and his grip tightens around his wrist. 

“Just away.”

“Things a bit tricky at home?”

A rueful smile spreads across his face, and for the first time, he meets her gaze. John’s eyes are dark and youthful, and full of a pain that no eyes so young should hold.

“You could say that, yeah.” 

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.” He finally takes a sip of his drink. Despite the sugar, his nose wrinkles at the bitterness. 

“Can I get you something to eat?”

“I’m alright.” 

“You sure?”

“I don’t have much money, got to save it for buses and stuff.”

Oswin eyes him shrewdly. “I’m making you something, yeah? Free of charge.” 

She ducks into the kitchen just as he opens his mouth to protest. “Stay put,” she calls over her shoulder. 

Out of his sight she calls, “so, how do you feel about chips?”

John chuckles. “You really are from England.”

Oswin pokes her head out from the kitchen entrance, frowning. “Fine, fries.”

“Yeah, sounds great,” John smiles, “thanks.”

Oswin throws him a parting wink before ducking back out of sight. 

In the kitchen, one of the fryers is already conveniently bubbling away, heated almost instantly by the diner’s onboard intelligence. It can manifest boiling oil, among other things. 

Above her, the fluorescents hum a lighter shade of blue, brightening the large, white tiled space of metal benchtops and outdated appliances. Oswin’s diner is just a tad alive. 

It’s also a spaceship, and a time machine. Being a diner is just its hobby. 

Oswin came upon the machine – the TARDIS – in an unorthodox way. Essentially, she stole it – or was an important accomplice in its thievery. She’s been keeping it warm ever since. Oswin wasn’t built to converse with such machines, her being just a regular human, apart from the being dead thing. She does her best, but the connection she has forged with her ship lacks the depth possible for one of its intended pilots. Still, it knows her, understands her, protects her. 

Her late partner, in business and romance and general adventuring, was the one who made repairs to the ship – maintaining its systems, and fighting off the constant attempts to retrieve it by its original owners. Me, as she was called – singular, unattached, until she wasn’t – spent half the lifetime of the universe studying machines of a similar sort, and the teachings of their creators, trying to grasp the secrets of time and space for herself. 

It infuriated Me, living so long yet being forever unable to see the full breadth and beauty of the universe. In cosmic eyes, ex-humans like Oswin and her partner were destined to remain small in cosmic eyes. No telepathy, no time-sense, and in Me’s case, no past beyond what data could be loaded onto a 41st century memory backup chip. They could never hope – and Oswin never did – to reach the level of Time Lords.

Despite pouring over the odd TARDIS manual, Oswin never quite committed herself to understanding the intricacies of the technology. Without the necessary telepathic and intellectual disposition, penetrating even the basics seemed insurmountable. After all, it had taken Me billions of years to become as proficient as she was. 

Since Me died, Oswin has let the ship run itself, and hoped for the best. 

Oswin sets a fry basket beside the deep frier and goes about finding something to fill it with. The fridge keeps itself stocked, in case of customers. Oswin doesn’t need to eat, though she is able to, and makes sure to do so when she comes across some new delight amongst the stars, but the food does nothing. A shame, she was feeling a little peckish on Trap Street prior to her death, and nothing she does now will ever change it. She is frozen in time, that means blood pressure, hunger, fatigue, hair-length, weight – everything is still. A reanimated corpse, forever preserved. 

She goes to the freezer drawer and pulls out a bag of chips, clumped together into a thick mass of potato. The ship could have whipped them up piping hot to begin with, but Oswin enjoys these little rituals. Mundane tasks to complete in a necessary order of steps. It reminds her of being human. The old woman she has become is going blind. White cataracts in her eyes cloud her vision. She can’t really remember what it felt like to be alive. 

Often, she would breathe just to simulate the effect, to remember the way her muscles used to move on instinct, without instruction. Manually, she told her lungs to expand, to contract, to push oxygen into her blood. These days she doesn’t bother. She’s forgotten the necessary order of steps of that particular tired ritual. 

Her lungs sit stagnant and lukewarm in her chest and she opens the bag of chips, shaking the solid contents into the vat. Ice crystals scatter at her feet. 

An anomaly cannot be hurt. Blades don’t move through her as much as move around, bend. Bullets dodging her impossible presence and right their course on the other side. Floating through the vacuum of space, she would come away unscathed, if only a little bored. She knows from experience, having been thrown from an airlock once or twice in her time.

In all their reckless adventuring, Me was the more vulnerable one, but also far more skilled in a scrape. She was trained to expertise in nearly all known forms of combat in the universe. Underneath her age, and her bravado, Me was still Ashildr – the village girl who once dreamt of becoming a warrior. There was rage in her, which Oswin calmed for a time, but then she began to feel it herself – a sputtering, stubborn little flame in her chest. At best, they mellowed one another out – Me’s old apathy balanced by Oswin’s fierce empathy. At worst, they sharpened one another’s edge. They were swift, and smart, and righteous. Sometimes they were ruthless. Oswin has done things she isn’t proud of. They say that regrets are the mark of a rich life long lived. 

Oswin lowers the fry basket into the sizzling oil vat with a harsh simmer and a dash of salt-smelling steam. 

An alien medical chip bolstered and repaired for human compatibility via Time Lord technology is incredibly robust – robust enough to last nearly the lifetime of the universe – but it is not eternal. Nothing is. It was a fair way into that second go round the lifecycle of the universe that the technology in Me’s head began to degrade. Small injuries began to stick – muted bruises, small cuts – and in what felt like no time at all, though in the uncertain measurements of time travellers it was centuries, Me ceased to heal at all. They tried a quieter life, which suited neither of them, but Me’s condition only worsened. Skin wrinkling and rotting, bones weakening, muscles tearing. Going blind, and deaf, and senseless to the world as the technology keeping her alive broke down inside her. She flaked away like metal in the sea. Both of them, rusting through like clockwork.

As Me’s physical body faded and weakened over time, so too did Oswin’s mind. Year by year, century by century, her time spent alive was dwarfed by her time spent suspended in death, until that brief flash of life felt like an insignificant blip upon her vast, sprawling, tangled timeline. The line stopped at Trap Street, and from that final point expanded, circular, breaking the bounds of its two dimensions and swelling out wide in three. Ancient in all directions. 

After all this time, Oswin has learnt to cope by taking things as they come. Life – or death, in her case – is a string of simple, moment-to-moment decisions. Encounter, examine, execute, move onto the next. She’s grown mechanical, in her old age. Rusting clockwork. 

She stopped counting the years long ago. 

Time is difficult to keep when one is travelling through it, in the company of immortals. It’s even more difficult to keep when travelling alone. 

Me clung to life right until the painful, rotten, spitting end. Flame in her chest like an inferno, she died cursing nonsense through gritted, cracking, blackened teeth. Oswin decided there and then that she didn’t want to die like that. Once upon a time, a very long time ago and approximately eleven years in the future, Oswin died right. She died nobly, bravely, for who she was and who she loved. It was her second shot at it, a good death, and for the second time it was taken from her by the same man. 

She has been tempted, on more than one occasion, to simply lower the TARDIS shields and let herself be dragged back to the dominion of the Time Lords, thus completing her eternal victory lap. Returning, the long, _long_ way round. The tattoo on the back of her neck still reads zero. The raven will stay waiting until the Time Lords take her back, or the universe degrades to an old, lawless chaos. Whichever comes first. 

Clara Oswald will die on trap street, London, 2015. Someday, Oswin will join her there. 

Oswin taps her foot against the kitchen tiles as the chips fry away, glancing through the scant gap between wall and doorway through which she can see the bar beyond. John shifts on his seat every so often, restless. He gazes around at the establishment in trepidation, as if looking for something. Giving himself something to do, Oswin expects. It’s better than having to think about the tough situation he’s in. She’s seen that look before, on her students’ faces and her own; lost and lonely and far too young to cope with either feeling. 

Maybe this is the way the Doctor used to feel, observing the beauty of the human race. Eternal, staring out at young, phoenix-bright, brilliant humans, flaring and dying as he watched. She often wonders if the Doctor would be glad to see her again, or simply pity the old woman she has become, twisted by time, fading in mind and frozen in place. 

Even the average, time-insensitive being will look at her and begin to feel dizzy, uprooted, nauseous. Vertigo in the belly, as if glancing from a great height. She is anachronistic, sticking out of the texture of time and space because everything about her is wrong. That wrongness only becomes more pronounced the longer she keeps waiting, and the fabric of the universe stretches thinner and thinner around her. Fortunately, it is flexible. It takes a lot of strain to form a fracture. 

One-hundred-and-one places to see, but the list keeps on growing. All of time and space – how can she possibly give that up? 

She shouldn’t have to give it up.

The Doctor reminds her, when she slips into old patterns like this, these ruthless, angry, spiralling patterns: everything ends. 

The boy – John – didn’t seem to react to her strangeness when they spoke earlier. There was no hint of the usual intrigue or apprehension. In fact, he treated her as if she were just an ordinary waitress. Talking to him reminded her of being alive, like talking to one of her students after class. Already, her senses feel sharper, despite their stillness. 

Oswin tips the hot chips into a wood-netted bowl laid with red and white chequered cloth, tacky and bright. She plasters on a smile of a similar variety and leaves the kitchen. 

John startles as Oswin steps briskly into view, and she catches sight of him hurriedly shoving something into the pocket of his hoodie.

“Order up,” she says brightly. 

Recovering from his shock, John grins in return. 

“Hope you’re hungry.” She sets the steaming bowl down on the bar top in front of him. 

He groans, “I haven’t eaten in months.”

Oswin chuckles at his sarcasm. “Better tuck in then.” She has witnessed first-hand the enormity of the teenage appetite. 

“Thanks so much – you sure I don’t have to pay or anything?”

Oswin spreads her palms wide. “It’s all yours.”

John grins again, grabbing a handful of still-scalding chips and shoving them into his mouth. 

“Hey, they’re still – “ _hot,_ she was going to say, but the boy seems unphased. Although Oswin is immune to burnt tongues and other hard-wired, split-second reflexes, she knows that John isn’t. At least, he shouldn’t be. She gets the feeling his earlier comment wasn’t sarcastic at all. 

Oswin leans her elbows on the bar top and rests her chin in her hands, intrigued. She loves a good mystery.

“So, John,” she says, smiling at the boy. 

He gazes up at her, eyebrows raised, still crunching on his too-hot fries. Again, Oswin notices his complete obliviousness to her nature. No shifting gaze, no discomfort. Either he can’t see her sharp, time-defying edge, or he’s pretending not to.

“I’ve got some payment in mind after all,” she tells him. “How about you tell me a story?”


	2. You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An echo, a reunion, and a story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edit: I’ve added a little section to the flashback bit for a couple reasons. First is that nothing was really happening, it wasn’t a real scene just sort of come Clara thoughts, which is nice but a bit eh. I wanted another scene between her and 11. Mostly I did it to pepper in yet more Gallifrey angst, like a gentle seasoning.

Gloucester, 2000

A low, mechanical drone thrums behind the walls, the panels of fluorescent lights above flickering as the great machine diverts power for its own nefarious use. The warehouse is empty; rows upon rows of bare metal shelves above sparking, heavy-duty cables that run like rivers over the dusty stone floor. The machine is wired through the skeleton of the old building, in the pipes and ducts and gutters underfoot. 

It’s starting. She hopes they aren’t too late. 

“And you’re sure about it, this theory of yours,” Clarry asks her fellow trespasser. 

“Positive,” Lee replies gruffly. “Trip the circuit breaker when the mechanism is about the fire off and it’ll fry the whole system, him included.”

The building shudders, and the tall shelves that enclose the pair rattle precariously. Clarry’s torch flickers out for a moment, and she taps it against her palm in an effort to restore its beam of hazy light. Taps turn to wacks, and eventually the light sputters back to life. 

“Ok, but how do you know that?” Clarry asks Lee. “Don’t you work at that Bathroom instalment place? You’ve never even seen this machine before.”

“I’ve seen things like it,” he mutters, adjusting the small, crab-like device he holds in his arms. Apparently it’s his own design, and it looks pretty impressive, though she doesn’t know the first thing about machinery. It’s a detonator designed to latch onto the huge machine that fills the old warehouse, bypass its defences with some sort of signal, and tear the whole thing down from the inside. Lee used more technical words when he tried to explain it to her. Very long and impressive sorts of jargon that seemed more suited to a fictional scientist than a bathroom installer. 

“Where’ve you seen things like this?” Clarry asks. 

“I told you, I don’t like answering questions.” He doesn’t much like talking either, does Lee Clayton. Clarry often wonders if she can trust him at all. 

Lee moved to Gloucester with his newly wedded wife, Ruth, about six months previously, and despite his near-daily visits to the local cafe where Clarry works, the two of them barely exchanged more than the socially required customer service small talk before all of this began.

“Ok, let me guess then,” Clarry teases. “You an ex-spy?” Lee pointedly neglects to answer. “Military? Special forces? CIA?” That makes him jump, and turn to look at Clarry with slightly widened eyes before hurriedly blinking away. “Is that it?” she gasps, and drops her voice to a trailing whisper. “You were some kinda secret CIA operative – are you still undercover?” 

Lee rolls his eyes. “Listen, I’m not CIA. I’ve never even been to the US.” 

“Hmm,” Clarry shrugs, “don’t believe you though.”

“You can ask Ruth,” he mutters impatiently, “I’ve known her since I was seventeen. No time for any special anything. I just know machines, that’s all.” 

“Okay,” she sighs, “dropping it.”

“Good. Now keep quiet, we’re getting close.”

A few weeks ago, Clarry noticed a shady-looking figure lurking around outside the abandoned warehouse she passed daily on her walk home from work. A stripped-out car factory or something. It’s the sort of derelict, urban gutter you just ignore. 

This didn’t bother her at first – she sees plenty of shady people lurking about on the regular – but every day the goings on inside that warehouse grew stranger. Truckloads of machinery unloaded outside, flashing lights and deafening, industrial clangs from within. She figured they were doing a restoration, except that there was no official signage, no professional team, just this one, lanky bloke all dressed in black. Soon enough there was a wonkily erected radio tower fastened to the roof, black and spindly against the grey sky. On the day she finally decided to investigate – only after noticing a peculiar buzzing sensation in the air that seemed to be emanating from the warehouse – who should she bump into but the stoic young Lee Clayton. 

Naturally, she had a great many questions for him when she found him tampering with the machine inside, but what shocked her more was the scope of the mechanism. A mass of connected components, like a giant computer stitched together with wires and streams of fibre-optics and plastic piping and vacuum tubes. The machine gave off a heady scent that made her feel dizzy. Perhaps it was more feeling than scent, but that admission felt a bit too sci-fi. Nevertheless, that’s what it felt like, a field of psychic interference. 

Lee tried to get her to leave the place alone, but Clarry has always been too curious for her own good. It’s part of why she never settled in one place for long. Her mother used to say she was like a leaf on the wind. 

So followed a trail of causal dominos; bush-bound observations through binoculars like a pair of proper spies, investigations into the origins of the materials brought in via unsolicited phone calls, public reconnaissance met with general hostility, and the testing of Lee’s strange inventions on the air outside. Now Lee is stuck with her. She thinks he secretly enjoys her company.

Following the cables to their point of convergence, the trespassers come upon a clearing in the centre of the warehouse. The central rows of shelving have been shoved out of the centre and stacked in precarious lean-tos on the outskirts of the room. Occupying the newly liberated space is the heart of the machine itself, with a small control panel erected a few metres away next to a very large and important-looking lever. 

As of yet, there has been no sign of the elusive inventor. 

Lee seems to know quite a bit about what’s going on. He told Clarry that someone was building a weapon, something dangerous. Clarry’s first instinct was to call the police, but Lee told her they wouldn’t get far. In hindsight, it seemed strange to Clarry that she went along with his request so peaceably. Shady guy building a supposedly dangerous machine, and the shady, quiet bloke no one seems to know much about tells you not to go to the police under any circumstances… But Lee has a way about him. He’s very persuasive. Besides, Clarry has been too wrapped up in the adventure to dwell upon the myriad details that just don’t add up. 

“So, time to kick the plan into action, yeah?” Clarry nudges Lee playfully.

“I’m still not so sure about this.” Lee studies the black mass of the machine with intense focus, scratching his head in thought. It’s funny, from the way he usually acts, she never would have pegged him as being all that bright. 

“You need a distraction so you can go around and mess with his setup,” Clarry prompts him. 

“Which puts you in danger.” They’ve had this discussion already. 

“Don’t worry about me, I’ll talk his head off. It’s not like you could, all stoic-like.”

He presses his lips together. “Fair point.”

“Besides, you’re the one who phoned me to come along, kept me in the loop when you were checking up on things here.”

“Because you threatened to tell Ruth about all this if I didn’t!” 

“You should really tell your wife about your hobbies, mate. She finds out about this,” – Clarry points at him, and then herself – “she’s gonna assume something else is happening.” 

“I told you,” Lee’s face goes stone cold. He grabs Clarry’s arm, and she stops. “Ruth can’t know anything about any of this. What we’re doing, where we’ve been. Not a word.” He cuts his hand through the air to emphasise the point.

“I know. Kidding, yeah?” Clarry tugs her arm out of his grasp. “Secret’s safe.” The protectiveness is sweet, but Clarry wonders whether it’s sustainable to keep secrets like this in a marriage. Lee certainly seems to know a lot about the weird and dangerous and quite-possibly-alien (if her theory is correct). It has crossed Clarry’s mind that Lee could actually be an alien, but what sort of alien would work at Bathrooms4U of his own volition? 

“Ok.” Clarry nods, getting back on track. “So, I go to the lever, make him think I came alone. When it’s about to go off, you set off your – whatever it is. Overload the system.” 

“Right,” Lee nods, clearly glad of the change of topic. 

“And that’s the only way to get rid of this guy?”

“It’s not like it’s just some bloke.” Lee often refers to the shady inventor as an it. It, she’s gathered, probably means alien. For some reason, she’s found herself far more receptive to the idea than she feels she probably should be. 

“This is the only way we can put it out of action for good,” Lee continues. “Trust me, anything else it’ll just shrug off, keep on going. We have to use its own power against it.” 

Clarry leans in, a conspiratorial expression on her face. “And what is it?” Please say alien, please say alien –

“Well, if I’m right –”

“If?” she hisses. 

Lee sighs. “I am right, it’s just –”

“Then who is it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“How do you know him?”

“Never met him.”

“Then how – ”

A crash sounds from outside the warehouse. 

“Enemy of a friend,” Lee whispers. “Must be coming to set the machine off now.”

“Lee,” Clarry whispers shrilly, grabbing him by the arm as he sets off. “What is it?”

“Ever read any Lovecraft, Clarry?” 

“What?” she snaps, but he’s already walking away, ducking low and heading toward the machine to prime his detonator. 

“Good luck,” he mutters over his shoulder.

Clarry swallows, steeling herself. Just a possible alien guy building a machine of mass destruction. No problem. She’s dealt with some extremely rude customers in her time. 

Clarry creeps around the side of the machine, past the lever and its accompanying control panel, and towards the rows of shelves leading to the warehouse entrance. A figure approaches, walking with brisk, clicking footsteps up the aisle, as if he’s wearing dress shoes. The alien-man’s silhouette is long and dark, and Clarry stays hidden behind one of the shelves closest to the machine’s important-looking lever. 

“Oi!” she calls, stepping out into full view of the figure. Momentarily, it stops, but soon begins its walk again, with no hint of being the slightest bit distracted. 

“Not so fast!” Clarry rushes towards the lever. The alien-man has walked past the lever, standing between it and the control panel. His back is facing the machine, meaning Lee can do whatever he needs to do, hopefully with less of a chance of being detected. 

With the electric blue backlight of the machine, and the still-flickering fluorescent panels overhead, Clarry gets a decent look at the alien-man’s face for the first time. Narrow and pale, with greasy blonde hair. His thin mouth twists into a scowl. 

“Hi,” Clarry says brightly, her hand poised next to the lever. 

“You again,” the alien spits – because she’s almost certain now that he is an alien. His face is angular and reptilian, and his skin is grey. The surface of it crawls as if something is attempting to escape it. If Clarry were to touch him, she expects she would find his flesh to be dead and cold. His eyes add to the image; glazed and white, like those of a dead fish. 

Clarry doesn’t flinch as the alien – possibly an alien wearing a dead man’s skin – takes a long, upright stride towards her, though a momentary expression of confusion flits across her face. How does he know her? The alien latches onto her confusion, and laughs. A thin, hollow laugh. Quiet and cold. 

“You’re like a roach, child. No matter how many times I crush you beneath my heel, there you are again.”

Clarry tilts her chin upwards in defiance, and keeps her tone frank. “I’ve never met you before in my life.”

“No,” he mutters, “I don’t suppose you have.” There is a calm manner about him, elegant and restrained. He reminds her of a serpent. 

“What is this you’re building anyway?” Clarry asks conversationally. She betrays no sign of it, but peripherally she notices the dark shape of Lee moving amongst the machinery behind the alien, beginning his sabotage. 

“A curious device, I am sure, for one as ignorant as you.” The alien man clasps his hands together and sneers. 

Clarry shrugs, and ignores the jab. “What do I call you?” she asks cheerfully. “I’m Clarry,” she holds out a hand to the empty space between them. He doesn’t come forward shake, at which point she shrugs again and lowers her arm, muttering, “Rude.” She’s glad, really. It’s not as if she wanted to touch him. 

“Clarry – an interesting variation. Short for Clara, is it not?”

“It is, actually.” She palms it off as a lucky guess, at least on the surface. “Bit old fashioned, I thought, so I changed it.”

“These sparks of individuality are so very curious.”

“Err, thank you? I think.” Clarry clears her throat. “So, this is the part where you introduce yourself,” – she points at him, and then to herself – “to me.” Her tone is slow and patronising. It makes the alien bristle, and narrow his pale, animalistic eyes. 

He glares down his nose at her, flaring his nostrils. “I am the Great Intelligence.”

She scoffs. “You what? Bit up yourself there, mate.” Clarry grins, and bows deeply. “The Great Barista, at your service.” 

“Barista,” he looks a little surprised, though the hint of emotion is quickly smoothed over with a snide grin. “I was under the impression that you wanted to be a teacher.”

“Didn’t get the grades for it. Mucked about when I was supposed to be doing my GCSEs – though I suppose you aced them given how you’re so intelligent. Actually,” – she stops herself short, taking a step forward. “How did you know that?” Maybe it should have been the first thing she asked, but the whole not-getting-her-dream-job thing is a bit of a sensitive topic. Still, teachers don’t get to go travelling half as much. Probably. 

“I know everything about you, child.” 

“Creepy,” she chirps, grinning despite her nerves. “Don’t care.” She jerks her head upwards to indicate the machine behind him. “What’s it do?” 

His turn to grin; wide and eerie, lips stretched too far. Cold, damp skin sits like a rubber mask over the wrong set of bones. “A telepathic field generator. I am a being of intellect – this,” – he indicates down at himself with a languid hand, just as ill-fitted and floppy as the rest of him, as if operated by something that doesn’t quite know how human muscles are supposed to move – “it is merely a shell, a vessel. This mechanism will send out a signal that will propagate across the cellular and wireless networks – such primitive, unprotected things in these early days – and slave all minds in its radius to my will, spreading throughout the channels like a virus.” His smile grows wider still, top lip turning up to reveal loose, grey gums holding sharpened teeth. “This period in time presents a shining opportunity. A burgeoning technological age, and a target who is completely powerless to stop me.”

“Target? Who’s the target?” Keep him talking, that’s what Lee said. So far it seems to be working. 

“Why, this machine will grant me the power I need to finally destroy the Doctor, and to absorb the minds of their precious humanity into my own vast consciousness. To do so this early in their time-stream would be glorious. So many worlds shall turn to dust, all of them collapsing in on themselves in a tirade of paradoxes and simultaneous, apocalyptic calamities. This universe will be mine, as it once was.”

“Think you’re monologuing to the wrong person, mate. I have no clue what you’re on about.”

He chuckles, and the sound is all wrong. Low and wet in his throat, like a gurgle or a choke. “But that is you, is it not? The sworn protector? You gave chase, followed me into this cosmic landscape. Unlike you, child, my scattered fragments think as one. I am a being of consciousness, my mind eternal. It is not so limited by linearity and biological materialism. My plans unfold across time, moment to moment. Some you have foiled already, but I have witnessed them all, I have learned – oh yes, I have learned well.” He takes another step forward. Long legs, with joints that seem to buckle and slide. “I will not allow myself to be thwarted by you again, Miss Oswald.” 

Clarry takes a step back. “You’re crazy.”

“Crazy? You are the one who is scattered. A mere echo.”

Her chest feels tight, hot, her head impossibly sore. Clarry leans towards him with a snarl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

Clarry pivots on the spot, and grasps the silver lever by the control panel – the one that will shut the machine down, though this would be unwise, according to Lee. If he doesn’t detonate his sabotage device soon, Clarry won’t have a choice. 

“Right, big scary lever next to a big scary machine that is starting to make a very big scary noise.” With its engines beginning to roar, Clarry is forced to shout. As suddenly as it began, the noise subsides to a dull drone, the machine’s metal innards clattering as it powers up. Clarry can feel a familiar tickle at the back of her mind, like a worm burrowing in. The sensation she felt outside the warehouse that first spurred her to investigate.

Clarry smiles at the thing that calls itself the Great Intelligence. “I wonder what happens if I pull it?” 

“The machine will deactivate. An inconvenience to be sure, but I will simply kill you, and turn it on again. I would rather you didn’t, though. As I said,” – he cracks his neck, and even the sound of his bones are wrong, soft and crumbly where they should be sharp as a whip-crack – “it would be awfully inconvenient.” 

“So, I’ve got a choice then, don’t I?” Hurry up Lee. All around her, she can feel the machine’s power building, the ground beneath her shaking as her hair is tossed up in a buzz of static electricity. “Leave, assuming you’d let me, and end up slaved to your big ‘ol intelligence, or make things just a little bit trickier for you before I die.” 

“Woefully young to die, child, but I would not be so rude as to strike down a retreating adversary. Go, and you might live a little longer, under my rule. It matters not, whether now or later. We will meet again soon enough.” He’s toying with her, or so he thinks. Clarry makes out Lee’s dark, blurred shape hunched behind the machine. 

Clarry sighs boredly. “Still got no clue what you’re talking about. Never seen you before, and dead’s just dead.”

“Ah, but not for creatures such as you and I.” His smile is slippery, his eyes just as wet, glassy as dew drops. Clarry tightens her grip around the lever. “Tell me,” he says, clasping his hands behind his back and beginning to pace back and forth in front of her. “How long has it been, this life of yours?”

She was expecting to be the one to have to carry the conversation, to keep him distracted. She decides to play along with his strange interrogation, and tells herself it’s just that. She is simply biding her time, and her engagement has nothing to do with desperate curiosity. This whole situation came about in a blur, the preceding chain of events tugging her along a well-worn path, like a dance she’s known the steps to all her life. Like muscle memory. 

“I’m twenty-four,” Clarry says. To her horror, her voice shakes.

“And you’re sure about that? “

“Of course I’m sure.” Her tone is thin, fading. Decidedly unsure. 

“It never gets old, watching the realisation dawn upon your face.” He smiles, wider and wider still. “It truly is fascinating, the twisted, demented creature you have become. A perversion of space and time – your master would be so very displeased. An affront to all their hallowed laws.”

Clarry feels herself pale, and spits her words with as much malice as she can muster. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“That’s the difference between you and I, child. My path across the cosmos is planned, deliberate, masterful. You are merely an accident. A little spill, flecks of you staining the fabric of reality. You’ve lived this life – oh, perhaps six months.” 

Clarry shuts her eyes. Now isn’t the time for a crisis. Her name is Clara Oswald, she was born in Gloucester in 1976, ask anyone. Her teachers or the old shopkeeper that runs the corner store by her childhood home, or the man she passed walking his dog every morning when she walked to school. 

Her lip trembles, but it’s just for show. All around her, the machine groans, that prickle growing ever stronger, the electric field all the more tangible; tangy and metallic on her tongue. Clarry glares up at her adversary. “You really like talking, don’t you? 

He smiles again. “Biding my time, child. The machine is almost complete. The telepathic shock wave will be released quite soon, I should think.”

“Oh,” she smirks, “that’s what you think. Got to agree to disagree, sorry.” Clarry takes her hands off the lever. Her turn to pace. “I’m a bit of a movie nut, truth be told. Love me some sci-fi especially, and when the hero faces off with the villain, all you’ve really gotta do is keep them talking.” It has to be starting now, the final stages of the machine’s preparation. What else could this feeling be? It’s like she’s falling, drifting apart, but so sure, so utterly sure. She knows where she’s going and what she has to do. She’s done this countless times before. Two sets of memories inside her head, and one of them fading. From behind the mass of the machine, a hand sticks out and gives her a thumbs up. 

“What are you playing at, girl,” the alien snarls. He looks properly angry now; his teeth pointed, ready to kill. The machine shudders and clangs final time, a haunting sound like cables twanging in an elevator shaft. “It has begun,” he growls, turning to face the machine and raising his loose-jointed hands as if in exultation. 

“Some intellect you’ve got there,” Clarry shrugs, addressing his back. “Guess you didn’t consider that I might not come alone,” she smirks, then cranes her neck and shouts, “Lee, now!” 

An explosion that at first sounds disappointingly anti-climactic, just an orange spark of flame at the base of the mechanism, but soon enough it licks along the length of the tangling, wires streaming from its mass, eating through their plastic coatings and heating the metal within to a red-hot glow. At the same precise moment, a torrent of blue light erupts from the top of the machine. It beams up through a small hole in the tin roof and the radio tower tacked above. 

Clarry spots Lee dashing away from the carnage, but she is pinned to the spot as the ground beneath her tremors. A crash, as one of the large computer components falls away in a shower of white. For an infinitesimal moment, the Great Intelligence stares wide, dead eyed at her, and just as Clarry recovers from the shock, and finds her balance, the creature launches itself at her, all its elegant, sinister pose stripped away to the beast beneath. The movement is sudden and inhumanly fluid. Clarry wrenches herself out of its claw-fingered reach as the blue light of the machine showers down through the air. It converges on the alien figure, and it screams a rending cry that would surely tear apart any living human throat. 

Just as Lee said it would, the mechanism is backfiring. The machine’s power is surging back to its source, and burning it out like an overloading battery cell. It’s working just as planned, but there are motes of blue wavering in the air at her fingertips, and she feels an impact in her head. A wavefront sears through her mind like a firestorm, and her own scream joins that of the creature. Pain like she has never experienced, and a noise so loud she feels a hot trickle of what must be blood leaking from each ear. She claps her hands over her ears, but the noise comes from inside her head. The inside of her eyelids are blue, and her bones are on fire. They buckle as she slumps onto the floor. 

Someone is calling her name.

“Clarry!” the voice shouts again, as the noise peters away into heavy silence. A weight throws itself to the ground beside her. Lee. His clothes are singed and there is sweat dripping down his face. He touches the side of her head, and she feels a peculiar intrusion, like hands rifling, assessing her. 

“Shit,” she hears him mutter from far away. “That shouldn’t have happened. It’s impossible, I don’t know how it…” His face goes tense and his eyes narrow, iron grey, focussing on her. It’s as if he has seen something in her for the very first time. “What are you?” he asks, but already his voice is fading into the sound of the blood pounding in her ears. 

Behind her eyes, she sees impossible things. A graveyard as large as a planet. A black, rotting machine. A column of red light, sparked through with silver, and an excruciating heat. She feels herself torn apart and scattered. Living and dying in pockets of time, drifting from one to the next to the next. A leaf on the wind. 

Words come into her mind unbidden, born of an untraceable instinct. She doesn’t understand what they mean. 

“Run you clever boy,” she whispers, though whether the words are directed at the fading face of Lee or at someone else, she doesn’t know, “and remember.”

London, 2013

Her first week at Cole Hill couldn’t have gone much worse. The first day had been almost okay, if a bit of a whirlwind. A day spent settling, getting the lay of the land, and introducing herself to the staff. They put her in charge of a few year seven classes. Cute little kids, still new to the secondary school game, to lull her into a false sense of security. On the third day, she began her literacy course for the older students. 

Clara learned long ago during her placements in her final years of university that when it came to Secondary students, there was an unhappy medium between the first few years and the last. She could deal with the older kids, the ones who actually wanted to be there and for the most part found her lessons interesting. It was the in-between years that caused the most trouble – that phase in which all children make the unanimous, almost hive-like decision to cause as much trouble as possible. Things quickly got out of control; the ruckus led by self-appointed ring-leader Courtney Woods. There was yelling, standing on desks, paper planes flying thick in the air like a swarm of sharp, white birds. Clara lost her temper – more than that, she felt lost, hysterical, powerless like she never had before. This was mundane stuff; this was supposed to be the easy stuff that the everyday people got on with all the time. She’d faced off against aliens, and robots, and alien robots, but a room full of rowdy fourteen-year-olds finally snapped her iron-clad nerve. It was humiliating. 

Tough, she thought, because mundane is all she has now. She hasn’t seen the Doctor in six months. 

After Trenzalore, Clara was exhausted, in both muscle and mind, and though she tried to press the Doctor for answers, she didn’t have the fight in her to stand up to his insistence that she go home and get a good night’s rest. He wasn’t there in the morning, but that was to be expected. The Doctor usually left her to her own devices in between their bouts of adventure. Let her catch her breath, immerse herself in the day to day just to build up a craving for adrenaline, that buzz in her bones. He left a plate of Jammy Dodgers by her beside like an apology. Even then she knew that Trenzalore was different. 

For a start, she can barely remember it. Flashes; a dinner table, a masked figure, a graveyard. That first part makes sense, mostly. She can trace the path she must have taken between one scene and the next. After that things become more muddled. A looming edifice, which was the black, rotting shell of the TARDIS. Memories she wasn’t supposed to have, like a white cliffside, burning corpses, an open book. A vermillion column of sparkling light, its heat tearing her apart. She was in the London Underground, and inside a Dalek, and watching a little yellow car speed past on a quaint town road. In a cave, a purple presence rumbling beneath her, and fire on the horizon. Following these trains of thought make her head ache and spin, and usually the Doctor would be there to tell her not to worry, to just relax, and come along. Now that he’s gone, she has to convince herself to do these things – things that are against her nature, like letting a mystery go unsolved. 

Clara has strange dreams now. Something chases her, and her wrists are gripped by tendrils like ivy, or cables, pulling her along. Red threads of fate. She feels like she’s going mad. 

It’s almost eight. No one else is still at the school save the groundskeeper, but Clara stayed in the classroom where she held her final lesson of the day until the sky outside her window grew dark. Marking, putting together lesson plans for next week, which she is determined to ensure goes smoother than the first. These are all things she could have done at home instead, but being home reminds her of all the unpacking she still hasn’t done. It’s a new apartment, a small, walled-off square within an imposing, pale grey cinder block. 

Although it hurt to admit at first, Angie and Archie are too old now for a babysitter, the throes of grief they were trapped in after their mother’s death having finally subsided to a dull, background ache they will carry for the rest of their lives. They don’t need her anymore, which means no more excuses. No more running from the mundane future stretching out ahead of her. 

Moving out meant leaving the previous chapter of her life behind, the chapter punctuated at every clause by the Doctor. It’s silly, but she was worried that he wouldn’t be able to find her in her new house, like a kid wondering if Santa Claus would be able to find them on Christmas Eve. It’s silly, but she still hasn’t brought herself to admit that the Doctor isn’t coming back for her. 

It doesn’t make sense. Did she do something wrong? Wasn’t she good enough? It has something to do with that final adventure, she’s sure of it. Those painful, loose-trailing threads of thought she dare not follow. It has something to do with what she is reluctantly coming to call her madness – because that’s the only word she’s been able to find for the feeling that envelopes her, encroaching day by day. Splitting headaches and lost time. The insomnia, the flashes of memory bombarding her brain whenever she lets her thoughts wander a little too far away. Hallucinations – like a reflection in the window, a night sky in the day, or a voice, teasing her. Taunting her across time calling child, child, child. 

She feels herself unravelling. 

Clara moves towards the English offices, and the cramped little corner she’s begun to make her own. Chin up Oswin. Grab your things, and go home. Even the thought of it makes her squirm with guilt. Her new home still packed away in boxes because she can’t bring herself to think of it as such. 

There’s someone waiting for her by her desk. Their silhouette stands long, its edges murky in the half-light. A ripe, yellow moon casts his outline in muted gold. Clara would know that hunched, gangling posture anywhere.

The Doctor doesn’t turn when Clara stops in her tracks, startled by the sight of him. His head tilts slightly, noticing her arrival. He studies a snow globe with what, in her opinion, is an unwarranted amount of intensity, holding the little sphere in one hand and pressing it far too close to his face. The snow globe is one of those things one might buy on impulse. No particular reason save an instant liking for the thing. Encased is an old-fashioned manor house with a miniature frozen fountain at the front, and little snowmen dotting the estate grounds in a picturesque winter scene. 

“Hello stranger,” Clara says, trying for bright and carefree. He knows he admires that about her. Anger mixes with elation. 

A minute shiver runs through him at the sound of her voice. His shoulders tense, and he turns. She’s missed the ridiculous outline of him. All narrow limbs and thick-jaw and rounded brow. He’s wearing the same purple suit that he was on Trenzalore. It reminds her of the colour of the light in the abyss, beneath, rumbling. Her head twinges, and she puts a hand against the doorframe to steady herself in the moment. 

“Wasn’t sure I was going to see you again,” She continues, in his silence. Casual, like she hasn’t been agonising over the thought every hour of every day. 

“Yes,” he mutters. Already, he’s twisting his fingers together, fiddling with the chain on his pocket watch. “Sorry about that.”

“Lose track of time?”

“Not exactly.” He still won’t look at her. The snow globe is clutched in his hand, too tight. 

“Been knocking about?” Clara switches on the light and steps into the small, white-walled office room. She comes to a stop a few paces from where the Doctor stands, folding her arms and leaning against the wall. 

The Doctor takes a deep breath and sighs, finally setting down the snow globe. The manor house is engulfed in a torrent of sparkling snow. “Yes,” he replies. 

“Alone?”

He hums an affirmative.

“Bit stupid.”

A slight smirk. “I know.”

“So, why are you back now?” Why now, and not earlier – because I’ve been waiting. Maybe it was a test. Maybe he does this sort of thing all the time. 

“Time machine, right,” he chuckles weakly, “I could’ve come back right after I left but...” 

“But I would’ve noticed,” she finishes. 

“Well, yes,” he fumbles, wringing his hands, “but there’s another reason. I mean, look at you!” He claps, facing her, not looking. “English teacher! That, Miss Oswald, is not a job for the faint of heart. Which, consequently, you’re anything but.”

“Are you complimenting me to make me forget I’m angry with you?”

“You’re angry with me?”

“Yes!” His stupid, confused face brings her anger right up to the surface. “Yes, I’m angry with you. I haven’t seen you in half a year and you didn’t say anything! I thought you weren’t coming back.”

His eyes dart sideways, lost. “I’ve left you on your own before.”

“Yes, but not like…” She doesn’t know how to describe it. Distracted, distraught, not looking at her. “Not like after Trenzalore.”

“I’m sorry Clara, really I am. But think about it,” – the Doctor steps forwards, hands suspended, raring to gesticulate – “how can you ever move forward with your life if you’re always travelling? You’ve always wanted to be a teacher, and now here you are.” He throws his hands out wide, only to hit his outstretched fingers on one of the closely-cramped desks nearby. He snaps his hand back and nurses it with his other. “How long would you have put this off if you had stayed with me on the TARDIS? You’ve got to have a life to come back to.” He waggles his finger at her, like this is some well-rehearsed lecture. Teaching her a lesson. “Relationships, a job, a home,” he smiles. “You know, human things.” 

“How sweet,” Clara says sourly. Leaving her to simmer in normalcy for a while, just to get her heart aching, just to make her wonder all the more profound when he decided to take her back. “How very noble of you – but don’t lie to me.” She wonders if this sort of stunt worked on all the other women she saw pictured on the TARDIS screen. There were, she recalls with a strange twist of jealousy and apprehension, a lot of them. It might have worked on her as well, before Trenzalore.

The Doctor wrinkles his non-existent eyebrows in confusion, or a mimicry of confusion. He’s obvious, like a kid trying to tell her that the dog ate their homework. “It’s not – “

“Oh, I don’t doubt that you’re right. Human things and all that, but it’s not the reason you left.”

He swallows, straightening up. She feels like a proper teacher now. A proper teacher giving him a proper telling off. She wonders how long it’s been. 

“You know, you never answered my question, back on the TARDIS. What happened? What happened on Trenzalore? Because it’s all fractured, all broken in my memory.” Clara shakes her head, as if this might help to clear it. “I haven’t felt right since, and from the looks of you – ” she notices the details in the light. His scruffy hair and red-rimmed eyes. Sallow cheeks, untucked collar. “ – you haven’t either.” 

The Doctor smiles – a small, perfunctory thing – and avoids her gaze. “You don’t miss a thing.”

“No, I don’t, and why won’t you look at me?” He catches himself then, and looks into her eyes. He winces. Just a twitch in the corner of his mouth, a slight flickering of the eyelids, but she sees it. 

The Doctor blinks away, and mutters near inaudibly, “Because it hurts.”

“What?” she sighs, breathless. She didn’t notice it happening, but she’s standing up straight now, her hands on her hips in defiance. 

“I said it hurts, to look at you. In the eye, anyway. It hurts.” 

“Why?” With a jolt, she realises that he’s being serious. 

The Doctor sighs wearily. “Do you know what you did on Trenzalore, Clara?” 

She allows herself to trace back along those forbidden paths of thought. Red string, pulling her back like elastic, stretched and retracted. She treads carefully. “We found the TARDIS, dead and rotting. The Great Intelligence was there, it wanted your name, but you wouldn’t give it. After that it’s just,” – she shakes her head, – “pieces, like I said. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I keep dreaming about it, but...” She screws up her eyes, trying to recall the images that pass into obscurity so fleetingly when she wakes. “I can never remember them properly. There was this red light. I jumped into it. Something was hurting you.”

When he tells her, he looks almost smug, or perhaps proud. “You followed it. You followed the Great Intelligence. You entered my time-stream, leaking out in the centre of the TARDIS. You were scattered, across every moment in my life, following that mass, that bodiless, merciless consciousness intent upon destroying me. Like confetti,” – he simulates the effect with his hands, fingers splayed in an explosion, – “falling, settling. Fractured versions of you popping into existence and rewriting reality around you to make yourself fit. You saved me.” 

“And The Great Intelligence?”

“Foiled at every turn. His thin lips quirk into a smile. “Like destiny. The fact that we even met in the first place is a paradox. A self-fulfilling, perpetual cycle. The universe pushing us together, and me, chasing the mystery, only for it to lead me right to where it all began.” He spins his forefingers around one another, rolling, quickening. “It’s all a circle. It’s… infinite regress.” The Doctor’s smile brightens. Smarmy, as if it all made for a fitting narrative. A good story. 

Trenzalore is where it should have ended, at least for her. She is a ghost in her own skin, living on while her mind drifts away. 

“How am I still here?” she asks. 

“I pulled you out. I entered my own time-stream – which is impossible, of course, but I like to make a habit of the impossible.” 

“So, what’s the problem? She thinks she might know the answer already. Suddenly, her throat feels dry, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. Beneath her skin, her bones feel old, worn down over a thousand fractured half-lives. “It’s over. The day’s won,” Clara smiles.

The Doctor’s lips crinkle into a half-smile. He is looking down at his shoes. “Except you’re all wrong, Clara. You’ve been twisted, chewed up and spat out all across time and space, chasing an all-powerful being of pure thought. You’re part of me. An inseparable part, torn and warped beyond recognition of anything human,” – he almost spits the word, in anger, not disgust. “Anything normal.” He glances up at her fleetingly, pointing a waggling finger to her chest. “There’s never been a thing like you in the universe. I’m a Time Lord, I can see these things and it’s all – “

“Wrong,” she finishes.

“Well, yes,” he mutters, lacing his long fingers through and through. “Not your fault, of course, but there are laws. Rules – maybe more like guidelines, when it comes to me – but you’ve broken every one. Looking at you is like… a paradox. I shouldn’t have been able to enter that place, it goes against all logic, all reason. It was a perversion of all the laws of time and space,” he chuckles. “Maddening, really. And I’ve always been mad but this…” He trails off and runs a shaking hand through his hair, sniffing as he does. “This is new. And I still don’t understand how I…”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have survived, but that’s beside the point, it’s both of us, impossible. Like offences to existence, and impossibly,” – he screws up the muscles in his face, tight-lipped and crumpled brow, – “impossibly tied up. Connected, it makes no sense. This was never supposed to happen.” The Doctor shakes his head, and finally stops his fidgeting. He meets her gaze; level, no flitting away. His eyes are deep-set, deep green, and there are tears in hers. 

“I didn’t come back because I couldn’t. And not because it hurts, because it’s wrong, or – or impossible. Because I did this. I did this to you. I made you become,” he waves a hand in front of him vaguely, “this.”

Parched throat, she keeps her tone level and calm. “What’s going to happen to me?” 

“I pulled you out, but you’re still there, in a way. Your mind is lagging, trying desperately to catch up with what it never, ever can – hundreds of years of time and space. It’s only going to get worse but...”

“But what?”

“I can fix it for you.”

Clara swallows, nodding, and pressing her eyes shut to blink away her tears. “Is that why you came? To fix it.”

“If you’d like.”

“So you’re going to, what? Wipe it all away? Go gallivanting off and leave me to my human things.” She uses the term with disdain. Everyday little humans. Anger is easier than sadness.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“You already did,” she reminds him coldly. “I don’t just mean now, but on the TARDIS, all that stuff I forgot.” Maybe he knows the truth now, not a trick, not a trap, but the sentiment remains. 

The Doctor dithers on the spot, looking uncomfortable. “That wasn’t exactly my fault. Side effect of the anomaly. The TARDIS trying to correct itself.”

“But it all worked out well enough, didn’t it?” All her pent-up anger is releasing itself, built up over six months left holding it in. She didn’t let herself ask questions back then, but they were always there. She didn’t let her fear get the better of her, even when she watched the Doctor skip and jump from the dawn of time to the ends of the Earth with a slick grin on his face. 

The Doctor looks hurt, and he asks her quietly, “Do you really believe that I would lie to you?” 

She tells him the truth. “I don’t know.”

He hesitates for a moment, before gazing up at her from a downturned head. “I still want to travel with you, Clara, if you’ll have me.” It isn’t fair, him and his shining, pleading eyes – because they almost make him look young, almost a bit pretty. “And I want to help you, and we can put all this strangeness behind us. I can take away the nasty bits. You’ll know it happened, but the fragments, that madness...” he uses the word she picked out herself. Maybe he knows it fits because he chose the same word to name his own condition. “I can fix it.” 

She doesn’t really have a choice. When it comes to the Doctor, she doesn’t feel as if she ever has. Red threads of fate, and a wanderlust, that since seeing the stars will never be satisfied by travelling the globe, filling out that journal with one-hundred-and-one normal, Earth-bound places to see. 

“Okay,” Clara agrees, and steps forwards, closing her eyes. The warm, red glow behind her eyelids takes on a sparking, fizzing quality. Heat in her chest, images behind her eyes. She feels a cold touch at her temple, and it all goes away. 

Within a month – of linear time in London, at least – the boxes in Clara’s apartment are all unpacked. It’s starting to feel like a proper home. 

The Doctor comes around in the afternoon for what he calls a house-warming party, despite the fact that it’s only the two of them. Clara has already had a proper housewarming party with a couple of old uni mates. She’s not close enough with any of her new colleagues to invite them along. She’s the youngest member of staff. Most of the teachers have a decade or two on her, except Adrian, but once you get him talking, he doesn’t seem to want to stop. 

It’s Saturday, and her marking books, along with their assigned colour-coded sticky notes and highlighter pens, sit in a satisfying arrangement on the far end of the dining table. 

“Look at this – your own place,” the Doctor says, throwing his arms out wide. The walls are tight, and the furniture cramped. He’s lucky he doesn’t hit anything.

There’s something lighter about the Doctor now. It makes sense, after everything he’s done. Retroactively retracting a double act of genocide committed against his own people must be a pretty big weight off his shoulders. Between that, and their escape from Trenzalore, he’s practically buzzing with newfound enthusiasm, all the universe a stage as he bounds across it, grinning madly. 

A burden of her own is gone as well. Clara knows that she stepped into the Doctor’s time-stream on Trenzalore, and that she was scattered into splinters across time, but she knows it like she knows the order of the alphabet and the days of the week. They’re just facts. Those events may as well have happened to someone else. Zero lasting consequences, which is just how she likes her more ill-advised actions. 

“– I could have a purple sofa, and a flat-screen television, and a popcorn machine.” Clara realises that the Doctor is still talking, and there is a broad smile sitting stagnantly across her features. 

“Come sit,” she says, patting a hand on her dining table, which is comically large for one. She’s going to have to do a lot of entertaining. It was listed as a desirable attribute of the property on the advertisement. “I tried to make a souffle, but I sort of bunged it up. Like always,” she grins. “Don’t have the patience for cooking. Got these instead.” She picks up a plastic packet of store-bought scones, sure to be dry and sort of powdery. Clara sets them on the table. “Oh,” she exclaims, dashing back into the kitchen, “and I’ve got jam.”

Having spread the scones with butter and strawberry jam, and set two mugs of tea onto the table, Clara sits, feeling perhaps unduly pleased with herself. She looks out of the window to the empty block of featureless grass next to her apartment block of featureless grey. 

“Do you like it here?” the Doctor asks.

“Yeah, I do,” Clara grins. “I really do. Like you said, my own place.”

The Doctor hums amicably. Along with light, he’s been a bit sappy, and altogether sensitive to any phrase or concept alluding to the idea of home. 

“Are you still looking?” Clara asks sympathetically. 

“Yes,” he smiles. “Still looking.” He takes a sip of tea. The Doctor has described Gallifrey to her once or twice, on the rare occasion when he was feeling both nostalgic and forthcoming. Fields of rippling red grasses, ice-blue, snow-capped mountains and silver-leafed trees. All Clara saw on her visit were endless sands, a dilapidated barn, and the gaseous gleam of a bare orange sky. A world bombed to craters, its cities on fire, the air thick with smoke and grief. Clara knows that he searches for it obsessively. When she’s not around – once she’s been dropped back home to stew in London’s little pot of mundanity – that’s what he’s doing. Scouring the universe and beyond for his red, broken planet. 

“Let’s say you find it,” Clara says, breaking the Doctor’s concentration on the wooden pattern of the dining table. “What will you do then?”

“It might be impossible. It might not have worked.”

“But you think it probably did,” Clara says, leaning forward over the corner of the table where the Doctor sits, on the side facing the window. 

“Yes, I do,” he admits. That’s the thing about the Doctor. Loads of self-confidence, maybe a bit too much, but it’s worked well enough for him so far. He always assumes that he’s going to win. It’s admirable, as are a lot of things about him. He brought flowers for her, and they sit on the kitchen counter in the next room. Generally, that sort of thing is a romantic gesture, but maybe bouquets mean different things to aliens. 

“So…” Clara prompts.

“So, I suppose I might settle, for a bit. Help rebuild.”

“You? Settle?”

“Oi, I could,” he says indignantly, straightening the collar of his vest. “Maybe it’s about time.” She can almost imagine it. He’ll be a war hero, though she knows he will hate the title. He could be some sort of advisor, or scientist, or batty sort of inventor that they keep out the back churning out useless gadgets. 

“Do you think it will ever get back to the way it was? The way you described it, I mean.”

His smile slips a rung towards grim. “On the surface, yes, after a long time. Everything heals eventually. Everything begins again.” 

Clara smiles at him, but turns her gaze quickly away and attends to her scone. 

She generally thinks of herself as a pretty smart person, which is why she hates the way she feels when the Doctor is around, especially when he spouts something profound in between all the hand flailing and nonsensical anecdotes. She’s falling – proper head-over-heels, cartoon heart-eyes popping out of her head falling. It makes sense, she reasons. He’s brilliant, quick, funny, and even a bit nice looking if you overlook the weird shape of his head. He’s alien, too, which is probably the only sort of guy she was going to fall for. All the Earth ones she’s been with have been a bit rubbish, the sort that don’t like it when you’re smarter than them or louder than them or even slightly critical of their deeply ingrained, misogynistic habits. She remembers convincing herself back in high school, when she started catching the wrong sort of feelings for her female friends, that guys would wisen up and mature as soon as she got to uni. This did not come to pass. The Doctor’s a thousand years old, that’s about as mature as she’s ever going to get. About as impossible, never-gonna-happen as she could possibly get as well. She sets these lofty standards for herself. It’s a bad habit. 

“To tell you the truth, I used to hate it.”

“Hmm, what?” Clara says distractedly. She can see the bouquet of flowers sitting in the kitchen, bright and a bit garish, like so many mixed signals. 

“Gallifrey,” the Doctor says. He is, once again, tracing the wood pattern of the table with his eyes as if he might be able to bore holes into its surface if he stares hard enough.

“You hated it?”

“Oh,” he shrugs, “only in the way you might hate a boring hometown, or a pair of overbearing parents,” he backtracks, and takes a bite of scone. 

“Well, you know what they say. Distance makes the heart grow fonder. Or, hearts, in your case.”

“Yes.” The Doctor seems to consider the phrase for a moment, mull it over in his mouth, along with the rich tea coating his teeth. “Yes, I suppose it does. But you never –” He leans forward, elbows bent upon the table. He comes dangerously close to knocking his mug onto the newly deep-cleaned carpet. Clara ignores the persistent fluttering in her chest. “– you never forget your home. No matter how far you travel, you never forget where you began.” After a foray into his new variety of fond, sappy smiles, the Doctor leans back and clears his throat. “Like Lancashire. Going back to Lancashire any time soon?” 

“Once I’ve spent a thousand years away, maybe I’ll consider it.” 

The Doctor laughs, which Clara is far too pleased about. It’s nothing to be too proud of. He laughs easily nowadays. 

“You’ll come and visit though, yeah?” Clara asks. In all honesty, this is the prospect that has been selfishly bothering her since Gallifrey was saved, since she convinced the Doctor to stand back from the button that would destroy his world, and force him to live alone with the guilt of the act. He has been running for so long, from them, and then from his guilt, of course he should want to return. To settle. But what is she meant to do when the Doctor goes home? 

“Of course,” the Doctor assures her. Maybe it’s just her being paranoid, but Clara is unconvinced. She is, after all, such a small part of his long life, timestream excursion aside. She met some of his old faces on the day she saw Gallifrey, old and young. It was fascinating, searching for the spark echoed in all three pairs of eyes. Hope, boundless wonder, and a sliver of ice. 

“How’s the job treating you?” the Doctor asks. Clara realises that her eyes have been slipping out of focus, sliding across the surface of the window. Her tea is getting cold. 

“Good, yeah. Good. Better, you know. I’m learning how to put my foot down.”

“I dread to think.” 

The job is good, and it affirms her adult drives to accumulate responsibility and arbitrarily measured success, but the travelling is better. The travelling is so much better. When the Doctor goes home, it will be all she has, so maybe things will go smoother if she starts to properly commit to the dreadfully mundane. At present, when the Doctor drops her home, her routine consists of three things; work, sleep, and hope. Hope that she hears that stupid wheezing noise sometime soon to pull her out of lesson plans and marking and teacher’s meetings and yard duty. It’s not as if Clara doesn’t enjoy her job – she loves it, loves the kids, even most of the other teachers – but it’s got nothing on the whole universe. All of it feels like a performance, a front, just the boring backstage bits in between the main act. 

She doesn’t exactly do anything outside of work, doesn’t see the point. Other people get their thrills drinking or having flings or rock climbing, but the normal sort of thrill isn’t enough. It all seems so stupid, so pointless, next to saving worlds. It’s not as if she’s going to meet anyone in her everyday wanderings about smoggy London-town that can compare to the members of alien races that exist across time and space, hailing from vastly different cultures.

Normal people, she’s beginning to realise, are all sort of the same. Adults especially – it’s why she likes spending most of her time around kids. They probably hate the weather, are stressed about money or relationships or the way the government is being run nowadays. Every one of them left their sense of childlike adventure and wonderment behind once they realised they need money to live, and that living isn’t all that great most of the time anyway. Everyone’s bogged down, tired, a bit sad, so stuck in their little, spiralling lives, wandering step by step down into the dark, that they don’t see the big picture. They can’t. If they do, it’ll only make them sadder. 

Clara gushes a bit about work, and the Doctor imparts his fair share of far more exciting, space-faring anecdotes, both talking nearly as fast as the other. 

It’s comforting, knowing that the Doctor is choosing to let her stay around even after he solved the paradoxical mystery he was chasing, which drew him to her in the first place. Sometimes she’ll be gone for months, and drop back in time for Monday’s classes. Quick trim and a catch up on what she’s supposed to be teaching, and no one’s the wiser, so long as nobody gets close enough to notice. 

“Well, must be off,” the Doctor announces, when the hour is golden. “Thanks for the scones.” He gets to his feet and nearly trips over his chair in his haste to leave. He has a whole universe to search, after all.

“Thanks for the flowers,” Clara replies. “See you soon, yeah?” She stands and goes to open the door. It’s the sort of thing that guests do, in their own home. 

“Yes, soon. Very soon. Promise.” He dithers at the door, hands shifting to his coat lapels, to his floppy hair, to his wrist cuffs. Clara smiles at him, and with a flourish of his arms he darts forwards and wraps her in a tight hug. 

She doesn’t like thinking about how long all this will last, because she can’t see herself ever growing tired of it. There are close calls all the time, but she never truly feels like she’s in danger when the Doctor is with her. What happens when she gets too old to run? 

As for the hug, it lasts just the right amount of time; a little longer than strictly necessary. She waves him all the way to the stairwell before closing the door and turning, dejectedly, to her mountain of marking. 

Clara doesn’t like thinking about all that – old age and inevitable death and consequences in general. She holds a few choice mantras close. Don’t think about it, just keep going. Come along Clara. 

There are trials and tribulations to face long before then. She’s hosting the family for Christmas this year, and she’s supposed to be showing what she’s made of herself in the last year since leaving her nanny job and settling into the back-breaking humdrum of the education industry. She also accidentally lied about an imaginary boyfriend, because that’s the sort of thing families expect from successful daughters. She sets these lofty standards for herself. 

Probably, she’ll just ask the Doctor, and hope he doesn’t find Gallifrey before then. 

A small, awful, selfish part of her hopes that he never will.

Utah, 1994

“A story?” John asks. He draws his dark brows together in confusion. 

“Yes, a story,” Oswin replies brightly. “Quick as you like, I’m dreadfully bored.”

He shrugs, taking another hot chip. “I don’t know any.”

“Sure you do, everyone’s got stories.”

“Well I don’t.”

Oswin puts on a theatrical thinking face, rubbing her chin and furrowing her brow. “What about your story?” 

John looks up, perhaps a little too alarmed by this request. 

“How did you come to be passing through rural Utah in the middle of the night?” 

“It’s like I said. Sort of just,” – under the bar, he reaches a leg out and pulls his overstuffed rucksack a little closer – “running, I guess.”

“To nowhere in particular?”

“Yeah. Just away.”

“Well, I can relate to that,” Oswin replies, trying to get the ball rolling. She allows him a moment of silence, for eating, and perhaps for planning. She still hasn’t quite figured him out. He looks human, he acts fairly human – certainly knows more than enough about Earth to get by. Maybe she’s just paranoid, or maybe she’s paranoid about being paranoid, in which case she isn’t paranoid at all. Travelling alone, one has to learn to trust their own judgement. 

“You know,” Oswin starts, resting her chin on her fist casually, “someone once told me that stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten.”

“Well, your friend sounds annoying.” John says, through a mouthful of potato. “That makes no sense.”

“No, I don’t suppose it does,” Oswin mutters. “Why don’t you tell me about your family, the one you’re running away from?”

“You’re nosy.”

She hums amicably. “I prefer curious. So,” – she pats the bar top with her other hand, spurring him on – “family.”

“Well,” he begins, slow and reluctant, “I guess I don’t know my real family. You know – my birth parents or whatever. Got adopted when I was little.” 

“Must be hard.”

John shrugs. “Don’t remember what they were like so it’s alright I suppose.” He trails off and snaps up another chip. Oswin raises her eyebrows at him, urging him to continue. She takes a chip for herself. “Well, erm… I guess I was sort of a lonely kid. I had this one friend, but we sort of drifted apart. I didn’t get out much. My mom was sort of… I don’t know. Overprotective.”

“Helicopter parent,” Oswin muses, “I know the type. I used to be a teacher, you know. Trying to get some of those kids out on excursions was a nightmare. Parents kicking up a fuss when one of the kids got so much as a scraped knee,” she sighs, suddenly recalling a number of uncomfortable conversations in which she was forced to put on a smile and lie graciously through her teeth. She’s taken every opportunity since then to tell people how she really feels. It comes with living without consequences. “We had to get rid of the playground because it was too dangerous.”

“Yeah,” John chuckles tersely, “sounds like her.” 

“You know, I was a bit of a recluse too. With the other kids, I mean, because I travelled plenty. My mum and dad were always taking me out on camping trips and drives across the country.” Blowing from place to place, like a leaf on the wind. She hasn’t gone back to visit her family – what would she say? _Hello Dad, I’m a dead, millennia-old time traveller – not just a phase, promise. Also, I’m bisexual._ It isn’t as if they were particularly close. After her mum died the two of them, in their grief, drifted apart rather than coming together. She was old enough to take off and leave, so she did. 

“They were sort of strange people, my parents,” Oswin continues. “Massively distrustful of technology – didn’t get my own laptop until a few years out of uni.” She tells herself that there is purpose to her rambling, and that she isn’t just an old woman ranting about her childhood to a teenager that would rather be hearing just about anything else. There’s an angle she’s going for; laptops haven’t been widely used for very long yet, and definitely not by your average university student. What was unusual in 2013 is perfectly normal when they are now. 

Sharing is important, she has found, when talking to kids like John – though she isn’t sure if there _are_ any kids on this planet like John. It’s a problem she’ll solve later. Sharing is a two-way street; you have to give a little of yourself to receive a little of them.

“My mom’s way into technology.” John says, “she’s like a genius or something.”

“An overprotective, genius recluse. I know the type.” Oswin takes her elbow off the bar and straightens up. She pivots on the spot and begins to pace. There has been little cause for thoughtful pacing in a long time. 

“So, John, let me see if I can fill in the rest of the gaps in your story. You’ve been pretty sheltered, yeah? You want to get out there, see the world, get out from under your mum’s wing. So you hitch a ride out on some industrial truck making its way through centre state. You don’t know where you’re going, other than that you want to get _out._ ” She grins at the boy, reaches down, and takes another chip. “Getting warm?” 

He averts his eyes. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s more than that.” And here it is; trust built, nice and sturdy. Here comes the confession. She’s a little bit proud of herself, considering how reserved and stand-offish John was when he first entered the diner. 

“I want to prove I’m not so fragile, you know. I can be independent. I can do stuff on my own and do it well. I want to prove to her that I can be a part of this new universe –” He bites his lip, shoulders tensing for a microsecond. “You know,” he mutters, lowering his voice, “the whole world. Society and everything. New ‘cause I’m… new to it. New to me.” John wraps his dark hands around his empty coffee mug. 

He’s rubbish at lying, though what he’s trying to accomplish Oswin still isn’t sure. What she has noticed, with crystalline certainty, is that John keeps glancing not-so-covertly over at the door to the TARDIS console room. Is it something he can sense, or did he come for the ship? It would be the first time someone has tried to relieve Oswin of her stolen transport. From lone grifters to bands of scavengers to professional Time Lord agents, she’s seen them all. 

“I know the feeling,” Oswin replies, smoothing over his slip-up. Making him think she didn’t notice, too wrapped up in her own recollections. “Like something’s holding you back – someone. You just want to get out there and see all those stars, all those planets.”

“Yeah,” he smiles wistfully. “Shame that commercial space travel won’t be perfected on this planet for another two centuries – probably,” he blurts out. Again, he looks down. His leg is bouncing beneath the bar top at a feverish velocity. 

“Well, no need to look too disappointed John. Still a whole planet worth of possibilities right here.” 

“Haven’t really seen any of them yet.” John glances to his left at the large windows panelling the front of the diner. The starry dark, the flat crag of burnt sands and the cliffs beyond, cast silver beneath the moon. “All that desert,” he mumbles. “Looks just like home.” 

That gives Oswin a start – but it’s nothing, probably. Lots of planets have deserts. 

“Where are you gonna go, John?” she softens her tone. He’s just a kid – quite possibly an alien kid, but still a kid. 

“Don’t know. I just needed to get away. My mom, she’s not just a helicopter, or whatever you said. She’s not always that nice either.” Absently, his fingers wander up to touch the side of his neck. “She means well, but…” He doesn’t seem able to finish the sentence. 

And that really gets her. She was lucky, growing up with two loving parents, but she’s met plenty of kids that have come into class hiding bruises, or wearing tattered clothes, or looking out at the world with sadness in their eyes far too profound for their young age. The sort of kids that hang around the schoolyard as long as they can after the rest of the students have rushed out the gates. If this is a trick, or a trap, she frankly doesn’t care, because so far she has established just one concrete fact about this boy. He’s a terrible liar. 

“Tell you what, John, why don’t you stay here awhile?”

“What,” – he wrinkles his brow, and, seemingly involuntarily, looks askance towards the TARDIS console room, – “in a diner?”

Oswin shrugs. “Yeah, why not.”

“Don’t you have a house?”

“Not exactly, but this place is bigger than it looks.” She winks, and John grins, a little too widely to be caused only by a wink. A triumphant smile. So, a trick and trap both, but, as Oswin told him, she’s dreadfully bored. Dreadfully lonely, and curious, and tired. There’s something about him, this boy, like a sheen across those dark eyes that remind her of an abyss, stared over and only ever half-remembered. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, and that’s the sort of quandary she likes best. A mystery most definitely worth solving. 

“Could work in the kitchen, I guess,” John considers. “Help out. Save up some cash to get somewhere better – no offence,” he adds placatingly. 

“None taken. It’s not the sort of place you want to stay in forever.” 

“Don’t you, though?” Again, John glances towards the door at the far end of the diner.

“What’s that about?”

He startles. “Err, what’s what about?”

“That door,” Oswin jerks her head to the side to indicate it. “You keep looking at it. Why?” 

John hesitates, mouth slightly agape. “I, umm, I thought I heard something. Behind it.”

“Probably just the generator.”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, dropping the inquiry far too quickly for a curious kid. John finishes the last of the chips, while Oswin stares placidly into space. She catches herself doing this sometimes. Slipping, getting lost in empty time. “Err,” John ventures, tilting his head to block Oswin’s view of the far wall. “I could get started with the washing up, you know, if I’m going to be working here.” 

“Ta, that’d be great,” Oswin beams, snapping back to attention. “See, look at that initiative. I like you already. Not enough for a dishwasher load. Sink’s out the back.”

“Thanks,” he mutters, jumping down from the barstool and making his way around to the other side of the bench. He looks away from her awkwardly while he sidles past, towering over her yet hanging his head. 

Oswin hears the water start running in the kitchen as John gets to work. She watches him from around the corner, and it takes him a while to notice. John looks up at her with wide eyes, paling under her inquisitive stare. 

John clears his throat quietly. “So, do you run this place all on your own?” he asks.

Oswin sighs. An old woman, about to launch into old stories. “I didn’t always. People pass through, looking for work. Tourist town though, so they don’t usually stay long.” Me, Jack, Melody, Jenny – a great many others, left behind, forever changed by the Doctor. The whole rotating rota of them were something of a clean-up crew. Debt collectors, dishing out compensation across the universe. Operation clean-up in the aftermath of the oncoming storm. They were good times, old times. Irrevocably over. 

In the intervening millennia, Oswin went through what she never thought she would be forced to endure. Immortality is never quite perfect, and all of them were granted infinites of a different size. A long, long fuse, but burning all the same. A Mire chip, early exposure to the time vortex plus genetic experimentations, a splinter of the Doctor’s own DNA, perpetual life granted by a girl with the power of a god – all of it degraded eventually, and that was to say nothing of the numerous mortal companions, humans and countless other species, who flared and died like firecrackers fizzling out in the night. When she was Clara, she had experienced loss as well. Her mother, when she was nineteen – and that was something almost similar, a slow, relentless sickness eating her up. And, of course, there was Danny, but that was sudden, a steel-sharp, gut-punch of an accident. It was different to that long, slow fade. All she could do was stand and watch. 

“Just me now,” Oswin finishes.

“Don’t you get lonely?” 

“Yeah,” she sighs, “I suppose I do.” She takes a breath just to remember how it feels, and it shakes. To John, it might sound like she is fighting back tears. In reality, her throat is unused to the passage of air. Talking to John let her forget her reality for a moment, the way her whole body feels like a phantom limb. She always assumed she would get used to the feeling. She never did. 

“Alright then,” – Oswin claps her hands and turns on the spot, – “get those cups cleaned good and proper, and set them on the rack to dry. I’ve got something to show you.” Oswin walks away before John can reply. 

She’s made up her mind, because he’s right. She is lonely. She’s hopelessly alone and she can feel herself fading, and she’s beginning to worry what she might resort to just to pass the time. If he’s after the ship, then this will prove to be an interesting night at least. He doesn’t seem all that competent. There’s also a chance that she’s just paranoid, and he’s just a kid that lets slip the occasional odd phrase and has a high tolerance for heat. Either way, interesting. She needs interesting – she’s built up an appetite for interesting after all these years, so much so that your average experience just won’t cut it. It’s like an addiction.

Oswin walks to the back of the diner and opens the door to her TARDIS control room. She’s customised the place over the years, or rather, Me customised it, the ship adapting to what piecemeal telepathic connection two primitive semi-humans could provide. The console room is warm and cosy – grand, like an old, gothic library with the dark-wood bookshelves that panel its circular walls, and the tall, cathedral-like stone arches above. A large, circular window on the far side looks out to the space behind the diner; a dark plain of rock, and far-off cliffs cut jagged against the clear, starful sky. The panels are protected, giving you a view right out into the sparkling, chaotic wonder of the time vortex without sending you half mad. The console itself is raised on a central stone dais, accessed by black, iron-wrought staircases on four sides, and the ground floor is wooden. Underneath the central stone platform, there are alcoves of cushions and couches and dusky, orange lamps, the comforts placed haphazardly around the pillar of warm machinery running through the centre. Beneath that, the engines reside, humming and purring like an enormous, contented animal. 

“Hey, err, Oswin?” she hears John call from the kitchen, seeming realms away from this little slice of old-fashioned, gothic-inspired paradise. It’s an English teacher’s dream. “I’m done with the…” his voice trails off, and Oswin finds herself smiling unwittingly. She loves this part. 

Oswin positions herself upon the central platform behind the console’s central pillar as the bright amber cylinder bobs up and down, a beating heart. She hears his footsteps approaching. 

“What the hell?” John mutters, as he steps closer to the entrance. His dark face is aglow with golden light. “Ridiculous,” he mutters, stepping over the threshold cautiously, one toe upon the hardwood, as if to test its reality. His wonder certainly seems genuine. “Oswin?” he calls. 

“Hello John,” she chirps, peeking out from behind the pillar.

“Some generator,” he whispers. He cranes his neck, turning on the spot and staring up into the high-vaulted stone ceiling. John looks back as Oswin, the confusion on his face just a little too theatrical. “What the hell is this place?” 

Oswin steps out from behind the pillar, her arms slightly raised. Chin up, showing off. “This is my TARDIS. It can travel anywhere in time and space.” A wild grin splits her lips. “What do you say, John, fancy a trip?”

His eyebrows shoot up. “You’re actually mad”

“Oh yes, completely.” She skips down the stairs, jumping down the last few and landing in front of John with a smile. “Mad woman with a box, that’s me. But I’m not lying to you.”

John surveys his nonsensical surroundings and folds his arms. “Prove it then.” And she swears she catches something in his eyes – a challenge beyond the surface command. It’s like disgust, or disdain, but it’s gone from his wide-eyed, innocent face so quickly that she can’t be sure that it’s not her paranoia playing up. 

Oswin winks, “just watch me.” Pivoting on the spot, she bounds back up the metal stairs and begins to dash around the console, pressing a precise sequence of buttons, then turning dials to equally precise settings, the dance not gleaned from any technical intuition, but memorised by heart over so many repeated attempts. Bash your fist against a wall hard enough and eventually you’ll break through. 

“So,” – she turns back to John, departure sequence programmed. She folds her arms and fixies John with a raised eyebrow and a matching smarmy grin. “Where do you want to go?”

John reaches a hand out to the stair rail, gripping it, and again gazing around him, taking in the heave of the temporal engines starting up beneath the floor, and the whirrs and clicks of the launching mechanisms locking into place. Proper sci-fi. 

“Right, err, I don’t know... space?” he says. “Like real-life space – and I’ll know if it’s just some projection,” he adds accusingly. 

“Space, planets,” Oswin claps and rubs her hands together, “I can do that.” Interstellar space, lawless; nice and open in the middle of nothing at all. Perfect for an ambush. 

Paranoid, she reminds herself. 

Paranoid, but probably right. 

“Well then John.” She grips the silver dematerialisation lever bracingly, gritting her teeth against the oncoming turbulence. “Geronimo.” 

The room lurches, and John clutches the stair railing tightly to keep his balance. The ship wheezes as it fades, the great, heaving breaths of ancient engines. The circular window that previously showed a quiet, moon-silver waste, now opens onto the turbid, rippling expanse of the vortex. Pleats of vibrant colour folding and splaying and spiralling, stars winking through the twisting black. John rushes to the window as the ship’s flight stabilises. 

“What the hell,” he mutters, pressing a hand to the cool glass. “Oswin, I swear if this is a prank –”

“Not a prank, promise,” Oswin cuts across, grinning. She jumps down from the stone platform to stand behind him. “Pretty cool view, right?” John nods wordlessly, and Oswin dashes off towards the door that leads out to the diner proper. “You can see it better from the front.” She opens the door and heads out into the diner, and even after all these years the sight of the void never ceases to amaze her. The long rectangular windows panelling the front of the diner look out onto the seething, churning euphony of nothing at all. Time for a little test. 

“Oi John, come and take a look at this.” She glances over her shoulder, quick and discrete enough that he doesn’t notice the action. Behind her, the boy is fiddling with the TARDIS controls. At the sound of her voice, he perks up, and for a fleeting instant she glimpses his face in her peripheral; flat and intensely focused. His features blossom into an animated smile in a flash that seems far too quick, and she hears him skip down the stairs behind her back, turned away as she feigns obliviousness. 

The glass lining the front of the diner is different from the window in the control room. The whole diner tacked onto the labyrinthine body of the TARDIS is just an extension, an illusion. There’s no substance to it at all. Just a jammed chameleon circuit configuration that Me was never quite able to crack. If it were working correctly, the illusion would collapse upon take-off, like a retracted fold-out bed. These add-ons are a new feature of a model slightly more advanced than the ancient box the Doctor lugs around. Whole rooms and buildings created from nothing. 

The long and short of it is, nothing human, or even close to human, should be able to stand out in the diner, look into the infinitum of space – the untempered schism between all things – and stay alive. If John isn’t what she thinks he is, then it might kill him. 

Travelling alone, one has to learn to trust their own judgement.

She has a hunch, to do with desert homes, a look of disgust, a familiarity with TARDIS controls, and the seemingly deliberate ignorance of a dead waitress plucked from the linear flow of time. 

“Wow,” John gasps from behind her, edging cautiously out of the console room door, arms out wide to keep his balance. Oswin remembers when the vertigo of looking down into all that nothing would grip her stomach and twist mercilessly, when her feet would slide beneath her, and her head spin. She doesn’t feel it anymore. One more instinct ticked off the list. 

John walks slowly towards the front windows, and he would have seized up by now, if he were anything but what Oswin suspects. She would have had time to pull him back into the insulated confines of the console room before any lasting damage was done, probably. She’s at least seventy – no, fifty percent sure. Instead, here he is, gazing naked eyed into the roiling winds of time without a care. Insulated in her frozen little bubble, Oswin doesn’t feel a thing. To her, it’s just a long drop and a few pretty lights. There is no time on either side to call out to her because she is without it. 

“This is so cool,” John says, awed and breathless. Careless. It’s obvious now, what the boy is, and inwardly she commends the high council or the CIA or whoever it may be that came up with this new angle of attack. Real out-of-the-box thinking. The sort of thinking that would get any student of hers a lovely little gold star. It’s like he’s been chosen especially for her, with the runaway act, a troubled kid from a broken home. 

And to think, she was beginning to believe the Lords of Time had forgotten her. 

“Come on then, John,” Oswin says, “let’s get back inside.” She puts her hand around John’s forearm, his hoodie sleeves rolled up, and she feels something she hasn’t felt in a very long time. Heat in her chest like flames between her ribs, red sparks behind her eyes, the sound of tearing in her ears, like autumn leaves crushed underfoot. She jerks her hand away as if burned – as if properly burned, with living, human nerves to facilitate the reaction. A hard-wired instinct, but one buried deeper than her humanity. John turns to look at her in alarm, and for a moment those black eyes are a deep, rippling purple. 

She wanted interesting, didn’t she? 

“Aren’t you a mystery,” Oswin whispers. 

“What?” John asks, brow furrowed. 

“Nothing,” she chirps, high-pitched. Her grin might be just a little mad. “Come on back to the TARDIS, John. Adventure awaits.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk I wanted Clara to meet baby Lee Clayton. We can assume she's met Ruth at one point or another while she was working at the cafe, and thought she was totally gorgeous <3  
> Lee was like "shit. she knows I worked for the Celestial Intervention Agency" "oh wait she means Earth CIA nvm"  
> There are a few things! I want to rant about.  
> First, I like to assume that every echo Clara foils one of the Great Intelligence's plans, rather than just helping the Doctor in general. I just like the idea that this all knowing being is constantly stopped by 1 chaotic bisexual with no memory of who she used to be. Also, the Lovecraft thing is because the wiki says The Great Intelligence is Yog-Sothoth, which is dope as fuck and way cooler than telepathic alien snow. I know there was no sign of the Great Intelligence in the dalek asylum episode but we don't know, okay!!! maybe he was there, maybe he caused the gap in the planet field or whatever (I watched the ep the other day jhgsjh)  
> Also! about Clara. She gets pretty pissed when the Doctor leaves her for 6 months. We're used to Amy just letting him walk all over her because he's been a mythical figure for her her whole life, and no matter what fucked up shit he does or gets her into, she will always have faith in him and boyyyyyy poor Amy. To Clara he's just some asshat who tried to lure her into his snogbox, so she's taking no shit. I wanted to explain here why Clara never mentions the time stream stuff again, except a few passing remarks in Day of the Doctor, I think?? lil memory wipe. Also I didn't like that entering his time stream had no effect on the doctor or on clara. Consequences, Moffat. Go figure.  
> And it always bothered me that Clara had no idea how to use a laptop properly in The Bells of St John (I mean, what doesn’t bother me about that episode, eeesshhh). She then gets genius level computer skills from that robot thing and they’re never mentioned again? I assume it went away when the Great Intelligence was defeated. So I'm gonna say her parents were just kinda wack and didn't like computers.  
> Already this chapter is over twice the length of the first, it is my curse.  
> Seriously, The Modern Prometheus has a section that was meant to be one chapter that's like 30k words. The plot Gets Away from me.  
> I've been procrastinating writing that by writing this... oops. But this one shouldn't be toooo long. Literally just writing it as I go, and I should probably rewatch some eps for the purpose of accuracy for flashbacks and all that. You know, important research. 
> 
> last, last, last thing. Do you think it works better with the flashback in the middle and the utah bit at the end? I plan for each chapter to go echo clara -> flashback for juicy clara lore -> 'present day' shenanigans 
> 
> anyways please comment and let me know your thoughts!


	3. Clever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A plague, an admission, and an assignment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first section is real long and not totally 'plot relevant' sorry (there's going to be an echo clara bit every chapter but this will (hopefully!) be the longest one)  
> Then there's a flashback that takes place towards the end of Listen  
> And another one after Kill the Moon  
> And finally, I introduce you to my son
> 
> edit: basic correcting stuff. I'll probably have to do another read through with the amount of mistakes, rip

**Baden-Württemberg, 1428**

The changeling hides between the cobbled walls of two buildings, the dark stone shading her from the mild summer sun. A rat scurries over her bare foot, but she barely flinches. Her focus is intent upon the pair of new arrivals to the town. They must be new; besides their strange clothes and curious attitudes, they are not nearly afraid enough to be locals.

The changeling was once named Clare, but she knows better now.

One of the new arrivals is a tall man in a long, dark coat. He holds himself upright; chin up and expression stern, like most men who fancy themselves important. The woman beside him is staring out at the village in suspicion. She wears a plain grey dress buttoned up to her throat.

The town rests in the shadow of a bloated hill topped with a stout stone fortress. The Schiltach river, with which the town shares its name, runs through the lower township on a shallow, rocky course, and the town wall is bordered by the Black Forest, dense and verdant in the summer glow. Despite the weak, milky sunlight that struggles through the grey dregs of clouds above, the streets are empty. Windows boarded up, doors bolted, red crosses painted across wood, fresh and dripping.

The priests of the town say that it’s happening again. Barely seventy years since the plague began to rescind its vice-like grip upon the world, and now it’s happening again. 

They say the changeling is the cause of it all, and she has no proof to dissuade their accusations. In fact, she is inclined to agree. 

There is something curious about these newcomers, as if they don’t properly fit. Their clothes are crisp and clean against the dirt roads and jumbled cobbles. The changeling darts from the alley, moving onto the narrow gap between the next set of buildings, getting as close to the pair as she can. 

“What are we doing here exactly?” she hears the woman ask. “It’s awfully pretty – I haven’t seen this much green in years – but I’d be wrong to think you took me here to see the sights, wouldn’t I?”

“Well, maybe,” the man replies idly, “maybe not.” 

“Don’t you ever tire of being so vague?” 

“As it happens, I don’t.” The man pulls a curious device from his coat pocket – a silver stick with a flashing point of light at the end. Some new-age instrument from the city, most likely. It emits a grating buzz that permeates the heavy, grim silence. 

“Weird to think this is Germany,” the woman says, a sardonic expression on her face. “Behind enemy lines about half a millennium too early.”

“Well, scope it out why don’t you? It might give the allies an advantage,” the man grins. 

At the sound of a scuffle on the near-deserted gravel street, the changeling startles and looks up to its source. A figure stands alone, his brown robes marking him as a man of the church. The changeling slinks a few paces further back into the shadows. It wouldn’t do to let him see her lurking about. The people of the town distrust her, and even those who claim to hold themselves above the superstitious squabbling of the peasantry have come, in these dark times, to believe their stories. Stories about her, and none of them good. 

“Hello there,” the man calls from some way up the sloped, winding road. He makes his way over to the pair at a hobbling jog. As he approaches, the changeling recognises him as Brother Scheibel – a respected Catholic official, though not so respected to be spared the danger of walking the diseased streets.

Brother Scheibel, short, round, and red-faced, stops a few safe paces away from the man and woman, addressing the former. “You don’t happen to be the Doctor, do you.” 

The pair of strangers exchange a bemused glance. 

“Why yes, I am the Doctor, and this here is my valued assistant Molly” the man replies genially. He reaches out to shake Brother Scheibel’s hand, a smooth grin on his handsome, angular face. Brother Scheibel casts a wary look around the street before stepping forward to accept the handshake. The doctor asks, “I take it you were expecting me Mr…?”

“Brother,” he corrects, “Brother Scheibel, and yes. We weren’t expecting your arrival until tomorrow, but I suppose the kind weather sped up the journey from Stuttgart. No idle traveller would have happened upon us in these times, given the rumours.” 

The so-called Doctor raises his eyebrows. “Ah, yes of course. Stuttgart. Lovely city.” He furrows his brow, leaning forwards in a clandestine manner. “What rumours?” 

“Why the plague, of course. A new and terrible plague!” Brother Scheibel cries breathlessly. 

“Ah,” the Doctor nods, “that’s funny” – he turns to his assistant – “I don’t remember there being a plague outbreak in the fifteenth century. The remnants of the Great Mortality, perhaps?” He directs the question at Brother Scheibel. 

“A new sickness, I’m afraid.” 

The changeling was born just after the turn of a new century, leaving behind the calamity of the previous. There were still ruins of villages that had been decimated by the pestilence, never returned to on fear of cursed earth. The forest encroached like an advancing army to conquer the empty settlements left in its path.

This new plague struck them fast, just a few months previously, without cause or discrimination in who it targeted. Patients reported tight chests, aching heads, searing throats, bleeding ears, and a fever like a forest fire. It takes the afflicted several agonising days to die, and the healers say their dead flesh is burned and blackened on the inside, their once healthy organs turned to puree. 

“It is such as we have never seen before,” Brother Scheibel explains to the doctor, “nor has any surrounding settlement experienced a similar outbreak. Schiltach has been completely sealed off. Though there are not many of us infected, no holy man nor any of the few learned men that reside here have been able to identify the cause or the means of propagation. Of course, we have our _suspicions_ ,” – in the shadows, the changeling shivers – “but we thought it best to seek a professional opinion.”

“Of course, and a very good thing you did, for I am a professional – the very best professional. So professional, in fact, that –” the Doctor’s assistant aims a kick at his shin, and his voice breaks off. He flashes Brother Scheibel a hurried grin. 

“Excellent to hear, Doctor,” Scheibel replies uneasily. “Shall we walk? The men are holding a meeting as we speak. Two in our number were lost just last night.”

“How awful, yes,” the Doctor nods, jerking his head to urge his assistant along. “Right away.” 

Brother Scheibel stammers, looking confused. “Dreadfully sorry, doctor, but women are not permitted to meet within the Church’s inner sanctum.”

The assistant opens her mouth to protest, but the doctor speaks over her. “This isn’t just any woman, sir. Molly is my valued assistant, as I said. I won’t be half as useful to you without her.” 

“Then she may join you after we have adjourned. Really, it is most improper. You understand.” 

The Doctor casts Molly an apologetic glance. “Right,” he says to Scheibel, “as you wish.”

“Doctor!” Molly hisses. 

“Sorry about this, Molly. I’ll be back in no time. Here,” he takes a flat leather pouch from his coat pocket and hands it to her. “Should be a Gulden or two in there somewhere. There’s an inn across the way” – he points at the white, thatch-roofed building next to which the changeling stands in shadow. “Get us a room and wait for me there.” 

Molly looks outraged.

“Tell the innkeeper I sent you, miss,” Brother Scheibel says to Molly. “Tell him you’re the doctor’s assistant and there won’t be any need of payment.” 

“Right,” Molly nods, bristling mutinously and glaring at the Doctor. “Thanks mister.” 

“Won’t be a mo,” the Doctor assures her with a gentle pat on the shoulder. Molly scowls at him. 

“Now, Mr Scheibel,” the Doctor says, and with renewed vigour begins to follow the stout man up the street. “Tell me about these suspicions of yours.”

“Surely you’ve heard of the horrid situation down in Vialas – witches, they say. Consorts and servants of the devil.” Their voices begin to fade as the two men walk away from the changeling’s hiding place. 

“Well, I shouldn’t think that’s the cause,” the doctor reasons in a blunt tone. “Don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions.”

“It’ll only worry the citizens, yes I quite agree.” The changeling watches the Molly dither on the spot for a moment, fiddling nervously with a strand of blonde hair.

“What should I call you, by the way?” the near-silent voice of Brother Scheibel asks.

“Oh,” the Doctor’s reply echoes down the winding hill, “just the Doctor is fine.”

Molly sighs and moves towards the inn. The changeling decides to make her acquaintance. Slowly, she edges out from the shadows, so as not to startle the woman. It makes no difference. Molly jumps with a gasp, one hand flying up to clutch her chest. 

“What are you doing sneaking up on people like that?” she says, with anger in her black eyes that quickly fades at the sight of the changeling. Molly cocks her head to one side inquisitively, stepping forwards. “Are you alright?” Her tone shifts, soft and dripping with pity. 

People who see the changeling have one of two reactions. Pity, as it seems is Molly’s disposition, or disgust. More often than not it is a bitter mixture of both. The changeling’s hair has been hacked off in tufts nearly to the scalp, and one side of her face is wrapped in dirty bandages to cover the burns that disfigure the skin beneath. The other half is slashed with hardened white scars, ringed in bruises and yellowed, callused sores. She is dressed in lank, grey rags that hang from her too-slight frame. Skinny legs stick out beneath a ragged skirt hem, and hollowed cheeks, frame her one uncovered, dark eye that glares out at the world with a sharp, patient, woeful way. People often mistake her for a child. 

“Your doctor friend is here to cure the plague.” The changeling says, calm and level. 

“Yes, he is.” Molly takes a minute step backwards. “Do you have it?” Her voice is rather deep, and her accent difficult to pin down. 

“No.”

“Then what happened to you?”

The changeling smiles, the expression pulling painfully at her hardened skin. “The people here don’t like me very much.” 

_“People_ did this to you?” Molly whispers, outraged. 

“That doesn’t matter. Your friend is wasting time convening with the church leaders. They don’t know what’s really going on.” 

“Then what _is_ really going on?” 

“Come with me and you might find out.”

Molly gazes up the street to where the spire of the Church juts, cutting through the texture of the town.

“They will be hours yet,” the changeling says. “The old men squabble amongst themselves in endless circles. People are dying as we speak,” she adds, tone cold and urgent. This seems to bring the Doctor’s assistant to her senses. 

“All right then,” she agrees in clear reluctance. “And I’m Molly by the way. Molly O’Sullivan. What do I call you?”

The changeling decides it best to use an old lie.

“My name is Clare.” 

Again, the changeling finds herself lurking in the shadows, listening in. She feels like a ghost; boundless, weightless. Nothing but a leaf on the wind.

She directed Molly to an old hut just outside the town wall, nestled in the thistles and weeds that give way to the dense forest beyond. A no-man’s land between nature and civilisation. The hut is the dwelling of an old woman named Magda, a respected healer and wise woman of the town. At least, she was respected, until the Church began outlawing her practises. They were frowned upon for a long while before now, but the men of the Church have been growing more righteous and powerful by the year. A retaliation against waning belief, in the wake of incalculable tragedy. If the persecutions that began in Vialas come any further north, women like Magda will be the first to be slaughtered. She and her apprentice healers would serve as a convenient scapegoat for any misfortune. They would be names witches, just as Brother Scheibel said, servants and consorts of the devil. 

Those in the town that are distrustful of the male healers employed by the Church (whose treatments are often no more substantial than a blessing or prayer conducted by a priest) come to Magda and her underlings for help. In front of the mud and brick house, potions ferment in glass containers, and animal skins hang out to dry coated in thick-scented oils. The changeling hides amongst the thickets by the window, examining the leather pouch she stole from Molly on the walk over. There are more than Guldens within its confines, and its depth is deceptively substantial, as if by some illusion or magic. There is coinage the likes of which she has never seen, and curious metal gadgets, perhaps new devices for measuring. She decides to wait until she is safer and better hidden before examining the contents properly. 

The changeling doesn’t enjoy resorting to stealing, but no one in town will accept her work. The shopkeepers will barely accept her money, but enough money will convince almost anyone. She might even be able to buy herself a warm room at the inn for a night. 

There are three others besides Magda in the hut, attending a patient stretched out on a straw mattress in the centre of the large open room. His shirt has been removed, revealing raw flesh, curdled and simmering as if from a heat within. They have eased his mind into sleep with some herbal concoction, but the man’s injuries look agonising.

On the journey here, the changeling told Molly what little she knows of the plague’s origins. There is a creature hidden deep within the Black Forest, one that Magda and her fellow practitioners of old, dying religions look to as some remnant of their outlawed faith. A buried God. They seem to believe it is a benevolent force, and in truth the changeling has no idea whether it is this creature that is spreading the pestilence. It is difficult to argue with the suspicions of the entire town, particularly considering the utter conviction of Magda and her kin. They believe it is the changeling’s doing, and who is she to argue? After all, she isn’t real. 

The truth was revealed to her piecemeal, until it became impossible to deny.

It began when her humble home just beyond the town wall was set alight, and she barely escaped with her life. She thought it was an accident until a group of strangers cornered her in the streets, blades drawn and intent to kill. Again, she escaped, but not before they announced their motive, prideful and righteous. They were servants of the buried God, and for the safety of the village, she had to die.

After this, the changeling learnt to keep a low profile, and soon enough the entire village was wary of her, as stories of her twisted nature spread. The plague struck some weeks after, and in the minds of the masses confirmed the rumours to be true.

At first, the changeling believed that the townsfolk’s stories about her true nature were mere superstition, that they had chosen her by some misfortune to be the scapegoat for all their suffering. She had over twenty-four years of memories to attest to her living within the villages and townships dotted in the surrounding forest clearings but, to her horror, she found that the more pressure she applied to these memories, the more they endeavoured to fall apart. Snow in the thaw; her life turned to liquid in her hands and dripped away through her fingers. 

Molly introduces herself to Magda politely enough, while looking around uneasily at the cluttered workbenches and shelves of herbal remedies perfected over centuries of oral teachings, passed down. She sticks out of course – with her clean dress and shining hair – but as long as the visitor is respectful, the changeling is sure they will welcome her with open arms. 

Crouched beside the window – just a hole for sunlight and ventilation in the wall – the changeling listens to their talk. 

“I’ve come from Stuttgart,” Molly tells them. “I’m a healer. I hear you’ve been having trouble, a plague.”

“Yes,” Magda replies, her voice thick and gravelly, “and we do what we can to ease the pain of the dying, but that is all we can do.” The other women let their teacher do the talking, intent on treating the plague victim that seems, to the changeling’s eyes, beyond saving. 

“You have found no cure?” Molly cranes her neck to glance over Magda’s shoulder, vying for a clearer view of the patient. 

“There is no cure. This we know for certain.” 

“Do you mind if I have a look?” Molly asks. 

Magda bows her head and steps aside, her posture hunched and closed. Her assistants step away from the body, allowing Molly to bend down over the patient and survey the damage.

“Burned from the inside,” she murmurs, pressing her fingers gently to the flesh of the man’s arm, red and callused. “His bone structure has been completely degraded,” Molly continues, applying pressure to the places where the man’s joints should be, but where instead her the skin sinks a few inches with an awful wet sound. “They’re being disintegrated, and here, the blood,” she indicates the man’s ear, from which blood streams in a thin line. “Too light, as if…” Molly’s face is screwed up in confusion and disgust. “As if his brain were leaking from his ears. This isn’t possible.” Molly straightens up to look at Magda, who has been surveying her with resigned understanding. 

Madga asks, “you are from Stuttgart – you are Catholic, yes?”

Molly reaches up to her neck where a chain is hanging, its charm hidden beneath the collar of her dress. She works it free to reveal a plain cross. “Protestant, actually,” she answers, “but religion won’t come in the way of my work.” 

“But you don’t understand the old ways.” Magda sighs. “There is a buried God, out in the Black Forest, deep beneath the soil.” The changeling perks up, hoping that the crone will reveal its location – hand over a map, directions of any sort. The old worshippers claim to serve its will, and its will wants her dead. Going to meet it would mean walking to her death, but she has to know the truth. If Magda tells Molly where to find the buried God, the changeling will follow.

“A God?” asks Molly.

“Old and vast. It was uncovered three months ago, and it warned us of a terrible curse. It does what it can to shield its followers from the plague, allowing us to treat its victims, but its power is limited.” As she speaks, the old woman reaches a shrivelled hand to her chest, massaging a spot under her collarbone where the skin is covered over with tough brown fabric. 

“A curse?” Molly prompts. Outside, the changeling presses her eyes shut. 

“Yes, something that was brought into this world by dark forces, one that the buried God was tasked with destroying.”

“The plague – is that what the curse is?” 

The old woman smiles, a thin line pressed across her leathery skin. “You are too young to have lived through the Great Pestilence, child, but I did. I was only a young girl when that dark cloud finally began to pass. The buried God tells us that this new plague will be like the last, multiplied tenfold. Even the men of the Church agree that the first sickness was caused by cursed people, the very first carriers of its terrible power. This time, the curse comes to us in human form once again. A girl that is not a girl. A changeling, shifted into the shape of innocence so as to protect itself.” The changeling can tell that Molly is sceptical, but to her credit she keeps it well hidden behind a mask of curiosity.

“It calls itself Clare,” Magda continues gravely, “and it is dangerous. The buried God has ordered it killed twice already, but still it persists, and just as the buried God predicted, the sickness has begun to strike us down.” At this, Molly’s expression twists into anger. 

“But I’ve met her,” Molly says. “She’s just an ordinary young woman! And you tried to have her killed?”

“If you have met her then surely you noticed.” Teeth poke dark and rotting from between Magda’s scarred lips.

Molly wrinkles her brow in thought, voice a thin whisper. “Noticed what?”

“The way the air seems to shift and putrefy around the creature. Dizziness, confusion, a stinging behind the eyes.”

Molly narrows her eyes at the old woman, and even from her window perch, the changeling sees something pass over the younger woman’s face. Her eyes glint, as if in a passing ray, unnaturally dark. “I did feel… something,” Molly admits. 

Even after the changeling’s memories were proven false, and she begrudgingly accepted that she was some spontaneous invention of fate, she held onto the belief that the townsfolk were wrong about her true nature. If she were an evil thing, she would know. She would think wicked thoughts, do wicked deeds – and yet she did neither. She was ordinary. Poor, destitute, badly injured and close to death, but ordinary.

In her dreams, this flimsy defence was torn aside. A voice spoke to her, and she stared out through the eyes of a vast, intelligent creature. It soared through the stars, and through strange worlds; shining metal towers that carved holes in the clouds, places where the people were horribly deformed, and the sky blazed the wrong hue. In these dreams, the creature she inhabited consumed these worlds, eating the souls of their inhabitants, and growing – growing larger and more powerful so as to consume even more. 

The changeling thinks that is what she must be, deep within; a creature, hidden beneath an illusion so well-crafted that she has even fooled herself.

“Look,” Molly continues, alert once more. “I know someone who will be able to help. A doctor, but he’s not actually from Stuttgart – nor am I, truth be told. We’re more like freelancers.” At her words, Magda seizes up, and from their places bent once more over the straw bed, the three healers stiffen.

“A doctor?” Magda begins, and then winces, clutching at her chest. The same spot below her collarbone. 

“Are you alright?” Molly asks, dashing to the old woman’s side.

Magda tugs the fabric of her ragged collar away an inch or two, and the changeling catches a glimpse of bright green, rippling flesh beneath.

“What the hell is ­–” Molly begins in alarm, but before she can finish the three other women surge forwards and seize her by the arms. Magda moves with uncharacteristic speed to a shelf of remedies nearby and pulls down a small jar of green liquid in quivering hands. The changeling stuffs her stolen leather pouch into the pocket of her torn coat and races around to the other side of the hut.

She hears Magda’s voice cry out from within, “Keep her here!” Her voice takes on an altered aspect; deep and rasping. “If this doctor arrives, you must keep him away from the cavern.” 

Perhaps it is foolish of her to try and intervene, given that the inhabitants of the hut want her dead, but she is the one who brought Molly here. If they hurt her, it will be her fault. She would move one step closer to becoming the monster they believe her to be. 

As the changeling bursts through the old, splintered door, she sees the three younger women holding Molly while she struggles and screams. One of them holds the glass jar of fluid, sloshing sickly green, trying to hold the young woman’s head in place as they bring the substance to her mouth…

“Stop!” the changeling cries, barrelling towards them, and in their moment of confusion Molly kicks out against one of her captors, who slackens her grip enough for her to wriggle free for a moment. The changeling grabs Molly’s hand and pulls her away, her assailants swiftly following as the pair hurtle from the hut and out into the reedy sunlight.

“We have to get the doctor!” Molly cries, “he’ll know –” She stops short at the sight that greets them beyond the hut. A crowd of encroaching figures. The two women almost trip as they skid to a halt, trapped on all sides. Some of the leering strangers wear a brand upon their chest, in various stages of swelling. Roots of green, pulsating veins work up and around their necks, like sickly, heaving creatures latched upon their flesh. 

“What’s happened to them?” Molly shouts, grabbing the changeling’s arm. Molly pulls her around so that they’re face to face. “Was this a trap,” she spits, her black eyes ablaze. 

“No!” the changeling says, pulling away from Molly’s grip and pivoting on the spot, looking for an opening in the approaching crowd. Townsfolk bolster the ranks. Alongside Magda’s followers of healers and peasants, the changeling recognises merchants and smiths and clergymen.

“You serve the buried God?” The changeling asks them, as calmly as she can. 

“Clare,” Molly says at her side. The changeling can feel her beginning panic.

“Answer me!” the changeling roars, but the crowd is silent as they form a ring around the two women, dense and impenetrable. She deserves to know the reason that she has to die. She is owed at least that. 

“Clare!”

When the servants of the buried God strike forwards, the changeling and Molly have already lost. All the same. they fight, kicking and scratching and biting. They don’t last long. The strangers are strong – stronger than they should be, with a greenish tinge to their veins and sheen to their eyes.

While the crowd pressing upon them hold Molly down, intending to capture, she knows that in her case their intent is to kill. Strange, then, that they don’t use blades, and that their blows are blunt. The changeling inhales the rich smell of mud beneath the grass before dizziness overcomes her, and her aching head starts to spin.

In that moment, she is certain that she will ever wake again. 

As it happens, she does.

The changeling wakes in wisps and snatches. A twig snap, a flash of forest flowers, a pang of nausea. Sore muscles and hands grasping her tight. 

She dreams of the creature that floats through the stars; hungry, eternal, malicious. It mirrors what it finds and, time and time again, on so many different worlds, it finds hate, and selfishness, and loneliness. An innate lust for power, buried in all things. In the creature, this want is amplified a hundred times. Its only wish is to grow, to expand, to conquer. The lingering, bitter aftertaste of its want remains on her tongue when she wakes up, and opens her eyes in the dark.

Slowly, she blinks, moving aching muscles inch by inch against the cold, cragged stone. Shifting black shapes mill in her peripheral, cast with a sharp edge of green light. She sits, eyes captured by the light’s verdant source: an orb of putrid green luminance, beyond any natural hue. It is large and ridged in texture, built into a wall of intertwined branches and vines, grey and blue, radiating cold. They seem to be made of metal. 

There is a low rumbling from deep within the stone beneath her. A vast body comes to life. With the tubes and transparent piping that wind through the walls – the way they expand and contract like living ventricles, luminant fluid coursing through their confines – the changeling is reminded of innards, of the carrion intestines that rot upon the forest floor. She is trapped within the stomach of a great, hulking beast.

The rumbling beneath her begins to deform; reverberating, morphing to a higher pitch. A deep voice crackles through the air like bonfire embers.

“And here we are again,” it says.

On the surface, the voice is mechanical, composed only of the clicks and snaps of metal, the flowing liquid and simmering steam, but underneath, the sound carries a mocking quality. It carries clear intent, beyond sound alone, that burrows itself at the back of her spinning head.

The voice rears again, “Your short life has not been kind, I see.” 

The changeling struggles to her feet. She stoops, squinting into the green light. The bandages covering the side of her face are coming loose, and one greying sheet of fabric hangs down her front. She reaches up and touches the callous, uneven skin it no longer hides.

Soft, muted footsteps run beneath the mechanical timbre, and the changeling watches a small crowd of shrouded figures exiting the chamber through an opening in the wall of metal and glass, where the veins of the monster have arranged themselves into an arc. The worshippers. She can see the greenish glow beneath their ragged tunics. The changeling stands eye to eye with the buried God. The damp, suffocating texture of the air tells her that the forest floor lies a long way above. 

“You are the buried God,” the changeling says, half question, half hope. 

“That is what they call me, yes.” The changeling glances behind her again at the opening; the only exit. The faint glow of warm torchlight flickers in the black cave beyond, and the indistinct shapes of hooded worshippers pass intermittently in front of the flames. 

“And is their name accurate?”

“It depends on how you define such things.” The sound of its voice sits stagnant at the base of her throat. She feels the urge to cough it up. 

“And what about me?” she blurts out. A changeling, a curse, an evil to be eradicated. Whatever the truth may be, she needs to know. “Are they right about me?” 

“I’m afraid so.” Deep amongst the ringing texture, she thinks she feels it laugh. A shiver runs through her, and as she turns, the creature’s metal veins knit themselves over the exit, sealing her within. Nothing but its verdant eye illuminates the chamber. 

“What am I?” She asks it. “I know I’ve only been here for a few months. My life is just a story. And I have these dreams,” she shuts her eyes and feels the sensation of them pull at her, like fingers tearing leaves to shreds. Crimson to brown, crumbling away. “This plague… is it really my doing?”

“You, me, it’s all the same. It all comes down to semantics, child.” Its laugh is even clearer this time, a hearty chuckle that shudders through the earth. “The plague is an old Silurian concoction, stowed aboard this abandoned dwelling and left to ferment over the ages. A weedkiller, I believe, though it works just as well against the human pest. Thin out the population to motivate the rest. Enslave their devoted mind and consume them.” It speaks of these acts casually, like the steps in a trade. “A difficult task, given the primitive setting of this particular battleground. Beneath the earth and surrounded by savages.” 

“You’re the one that’s doing this,” the changeling says, fists clenched at her sides. She pivots on the spot, unsure of where to look. The monster has no face, and its voice seems to come as much from within as without. 

“Were you not listening, child? Disgusting as it is, we are connected. Inseparable. Trust me, I like it no more than you do. With the way you have stretched yourself, we are almost like kin.”

“What are you?” _What am I?_ The question lies beneath. 

“I am the Great Intelligence, child, and you are a sturdy little roach scuttling in my wake. 

“What do you mean?” She can feel the monster grinning, somewhere behind her teeth. It’s like a taste. The creature seems to relish in her questions, to delight in mocking her ignorance.

“You are here because I am here. I am here because you are here.” Another low, croaking laugh. “There are stories of us, you know. Two forces destined to meet. Antithetical, cosmically opposed. They sing of us, out there – across the stars, through the past and the future. Humiliating, that I should be stopped time and time again by a pitiful thing such as you, though I suppose that is why the legends are so popular.” 

“But _what am I?”_ she scowls. The twisted expression sends torrents of pain through her singed nerves, where scars are pulled and stretched. 

“A curiosity,” it seems to smirk. “Unique, and after all the failed attempts of my underlings to dispose of you, I have begun to wonder if perhaps you cannot be killed, at least not until the universe allows it. Not until the right moment. You are strung along a neat and unwavering path. The only way to beat destiny is to wait it out. Trapped here, you will not be able to enlist the help of your charge –”

“Charge?” A prickle of annoyance at the base of her neck. The monster dislikes being interrupted. 

“I hear that a certain doctor has arrived in town.” 

“Yes,” she says, feeling a flush of hope like heat through her cheeks, “and he will cure this plague of yours.”

“My thoughts precisely. The pathogen has not yet been released to its full, contagious effect. Any interference from the Doctor at this stage would be most unwelcome, though he will never find us here. In keeping you sealed away, I have ensured that the two of you will never meet and begin tracing your tired old pattern. I find I am far more inclined towards success when the two of you remain separate, though of course,” it sighs, “I have not, as of yet, succeeded completely – but so close, _so very close._ ” The hiss rattles her bones, but she manages to keep her feet. The cold is oppressive, eating through her rags, her skin.

“Yes, there is something deadly about the pair of you. If you had met today, all may have been lost. As it happens, this place is shielded completely, even from his superior technology.” The temperature in the cavern drops further, and the changeling’s breath turns to warm, grey steam. The green light fades, and she is left in total darkness as the creature whispers, like air upon her neck, “He will not find you here.”

“What are you going to do to me?” the changeling asks. Her calm conviction is gone, and quite suddenly, she is afraid to die. 

“Well, I think my theory is in need of a test,” its voice slithers from ear to ear, cold. “Will that destined path of yours allow you to die? Will the blade simply bounce back when my followers slide it in between your ribs? It’s not as if a phenomenon such as yourself has ever existed before. What are the rules, I wonder, for an instrument of fate?” Its voice lowers to a whisper. _“What am I up against?”_

A crackling, singing sound behind her, and the changeling turns to see the metal veins covering the exit retreat in stutters and sparks to make an archway once more. She expects a flood of hooded figures to rush in with blades drawn, but the cave outside seems empty. Although the monster does not speak, she feels its apprehension in every nerve. Something is wrong. 

The changeling takes a step towards the exit, glancing out. A dull, red flash accompanies the soft glow of torchlight. A familiar, droning buzz echoes through the cave – the Doctor’s strange instrument that he used on the street that morning. The changeling feels something rumbling in her pocket. Startled, she fishes out the stolen leather pouch, and upon opening it sees one of the many peculiar metal instruments vibrating and giving off a faint glow. It pulses in time to the buzzing of the Doctor’s device. 

“What is that instrument?” the monster snaps. 

“Lovely place, this,” a voice echoes through the cave beyond the inner chamber. “Actually, it really isn’t, don’t know why I lied. I’m too polite for my own good.”

“What is this!” the monster cries.

“I believe,” ­– the changeling smirks, – “that is the man you said would never be able to find this place.” She casts a furtive glance back at the reawakening eye of the monster, then darts towards the exit. 

“Stop!” it cries, and she notices the frayed ends of its metal veins swaying feebly in the air, trying to block her path. Its frustration crawls through the cavern walls. 

“Molly?” the Doctor calls into the dark, closer now, and the changeling runs towards his voice, and the blue glow of his wand-like instrument. “I thought I told you to stay at the inn. Don’t wander off, I’m sure I made that quite clear. Knew you probably wouldn’t, that’s what the wallet was for. Sorry.” The hooded worshippers are keeled over at the sides of the cavern, seemingly immobilised. The changeling nearly crashes into the Doctor in her haste to find him, and he grabs her by the shoulders as she barrels into view.

“Oh, hello there,” he grins. “I’m the Doctor. Have you seen Molly? Blonde hair, dark eyes.” 

The changeling pants, “They took her. She’s back in a hut by the town wall. I tried to stop them, but you have to go. There’s something –”

“Doctor,” the monster says, its voice now amplified to reach beyond the confines of its metal cave. 

The Doctor’s eyes widen, and he drops his hands from the changeling’s shoulders, stepping forwards to face the beast.

From within its inner sanctum, its eye glows its brightest, summer green. 

“Yes, hello,” the Doctor says cordially. “Sorry, but I really am on a bit of a tight schedule. Set the security on this Silurian base to high alert. This place will self-destruct in about, oh, a minute, maybe two. Shut you right off,” he grins, then shrugs apologetically. The changeling feels an instant liking towards him, like sunlight on her skin, perhaps because up until a moment ago she was convinced she was about to die. In the back of her mind, clarity unfurls like a blooming flower. A purpose, pulling her along.

“Now, at a guess,” the Doctor continues, “a Silurian intelligence, some artificial mind that survived the extinction and, in its idle state, amassed consciousness enough to resemble sentience. And now here you are, following the commands of your long-dead masters, purging the surface world of invasive species ready for your people to recolonise that planet. Now, am I right or am I right?”

“Entirely wrong,” the monster replies. 

“Wrong?” the Doctor stammers, glancing around in confusion. “I don’t like being wrong – and trust me it doesn’t happen often,” he adds as an aside to the changeling. “You see, you’re giving my friend here an awful first impression of me.” He takes another step forward, regaining his composure. “And Molly, what do you want with her?”

“Ah yes, I thought she might be yours as soon as I spied her through my follower’s eyes. She would have been very useful to me indeed. There is something very wrong with Miss O’Sullivan, though I’m sure you’ve noticed that. These human girls – how twisted they become, because of you,” it sneers. 

“What do you mean?” the Doctor asks, all playful, jovial pretence dissipated.

“I take it you haven’t killed my devoted followers,” the monster drawls, pointedly ignoring the Doctor’s question. Although the Doctor is clearly rattled, he quickly rights himself, taking strangeness in his stride. Concentrating on the job at hand.

“Ancient Silurian biotechnology. Genetically engineered parasites – clever little things. Dying as we speak, since I cut off the connection to their commanding strategic intelligence, but their hosts will live. Manipulating the populace through superstition and converting their biology to use them as a slave force. Stronger, faster, immune to your disease. It’s not bad. It might have even worked if I didn’t happen by.” The Doctor smiles proudly. He seems to enjoy talking about his ingenious plans just as much as the monster does. Even now, the changeling sees the hooded figures stirring on the sidelines, regaining consciousness.

“But you, you – let’s talk about you.” The Doctor darts forwards towards the belly of the monster. He raises his blue wand, pointing its light at the surface of the hardened metal shell that encases the green light and metal innards. “You’re not Silurian at all are you? Just a mind using this old place as a body, technology compatible enough to house your intellect. Incredible,” he spins his instrument between his fingers, pacing before the beast. “Usually I’m a bit nicer than this. I would have given you a proper chance to leave, but too many people have died in this place. I will not allow you to spread this sickness any further.”

“Such a shame.” The ground rumbles, and the metal groans. “Another lost cause. Disheartening of course, but it was a challenging time in which to land. So very primitive. I have achieved much, and grown more still. Across the universe, my echoes call, though this strain of song is soon to end.” 

“Too poetic for a degraded protocol” the Doctor mutters. He peers forwards into the pall of light emanating from the monster’s eye. “What are you? What did you mean, about Molly?” 

“Call off the self-destruct sequence, Doctor, and I might tell you.”

He chuckles. “Not likely,” he throws a bemused glance back at the changeling, who stands a few paces behind, her face bathed in flickering torchlight. 

“And let the mystery go unsolved?” the monster mocks, and to the changeling’s horror, the Doctor hesitates as if tempted by the offer. 

Above, an explosion sounds, and a shower of dust cascades from the ceiling. Lit by the flames below, they resemble embers as they fall. The monster’s luminant eye goes dark once again.

“Gone already?” the Doctor says, frustrated. He brings out his glowing instrument again, pressing it to the creature’s metal skin. “But where? There’s no trace.” He puts his ear to the surface as another explosion rattles the stone walls. 

“Doctor,” the changeling calls, running to his side. 

“What are you?” he whispers to the metal. “Come on, what are you?”

The changeling taps him on the shoulder, and he startles, straightening up and pocketing his wand with a flourish.

“Should we be running?” she asks.

“Yes, probably,” the Doctor mutters, gazing up at the ceiling as it gives an almighty shudder. “Definitely should be running.” He grins at the changeling and takes her hand.

As they dash towards the exit, the changeling notices that most of the robed figures are doing the same. Perhaps they were enchanted by some sort of spell. Tricked by the monster. 

“Out! Everybody out if you want to live,” the Doctor yells. The disorientated stragglers obey, survival instincts stronger than whatever remains of their belief. 

The changeling and the Doctor reach the edge of the cave, where a winding passage extends up to the forest. A speck of white light glints at the tunnel’s end; daylight. They’re almost out. A flood of hooded figures hobble past, scrabbling up the slope, but before the Doctor follows, he stops short and turns back. He flourishes his wand again, lighting its end and putting it to his ear.

“What’s that?” he says, shaking the device. “That’s not possible.” He trails off, gaze wandering through the air as the cavern rumbles. Chunks of dark rock fall from the roof in great sloughs and spikes. Behind the layers of rock, red light glows, and more metal vestibules are revealed hidden amongst the dead mass that the buried God has become.

“This isn’t right – where could it have possibly gone?” the Doctor murmurs. “It’s evaporated completely, and the energy signature… This is beyond Silurian technology. This is beyond… no, it’s not possible.” 

The changeling stumbles backwards as the ground quakes and roars. The jolt dislodges something in her chest, and she feels heat spread through her heart, her veins, out to her fingertips. She could swear that, despite the season and the leagues of rock separating her from the trees, she sees a red leaf drifting through the stagnant, subterranean air. 

She feels a sureness, a steady calm, like sunlight on her skin after a long, bitter night. She felt the same when the Doctor first took her hand.

A narrative falls into place. The Doctor only found this place in time because she stole his assistant’s leather pouch. She was not put on this world to destroy, but to protect, through deliberation, or pure happenstance. She is not a curse, or a changeling, or a creature. Her name is Clare. 

She is Clare, and now she is finished. She was here because it was here, and now that the monster is gone, she must follow. 

“You did this!” a gruff voice cries, muffled by the explosions. “We are doomed!”

Hands grab Clare from behind. Strong hands belled by rough, heavy sleeves. One of the worshippers, finally carrying out their orders to annihilate a curse. This time it works, because she is finished. Across the universe, her echoes call, though this strain of song is now to end.

She feels cold metal slide across her neck, and it comes away hot, red, dripping thick down her front. She gasps, and the sound is choked as blood sprays, scalding. She can feel where her throat has torn, the skin frayed like cloth. Clare falls as the killer ducks away, a flash of green rippling by their throat, blackening, withering. She doesn’t fall to the stone, because the Doctor catches her. He is saying something, but the sound is drowned out by the collapsing cave, great slabs of stone raining down. She will be buried here, with the dead God. 

As she dies, words come to her lips unbidden, the foundation of her mind, leaking.

“Run,” she whispers, though the word is nothing but a quiver, a wet croak pushing its way through torn flesh, a whistle of air through blood. The Doctor stares at her, face alive with grief and spotted with falling dust. Her charge. He doesn’t even know her name. As she pushes out the rest of her line, her final command, the Doctor obeys. He runs, and the final streams of air escape from Clare’s throat, heard only by the stone as it collapses upon her.

**London, 2014**

The Doctor is quiet. He’s quiet far more often these days, and Clara isn’t sure whether it’s a new development or just another layer glimpsed, now that the veil has slipped.

She takes it as a compliment that he trusts her enough now to show her his true face, in ways beyond the literal. What has been difficult to get used to isn’t the silver hair, or the old, lined face, but the way he seems content to simply sit. No flailing, no wheeling about, no urge to fill the silence with idle, listless chatter. For the first time, it has come down to Clara to fill it herself.

Take now, for instance. After everything they have been through tonight, Clara isn’t sure what to say.

She spent a month or so in 1894 wondering if the Doctor was ever going to come back for her. Whether he was really still the Doctor at all. It wasn’t exactly horrible, living in London with Jenny, Vastra, and Strax, but she was beyond glad to return to her own time – with its instant coffee and TV dramas and distinct lack of corsets. Upon her return, she received a phone call from the Doctor, because it seems that he knows her better than she knows herself. One phone call was all it took to get the simple fact of it through her thick, apparently too-wide skull: the Doctor is still here.

Looking up to where the Doctor sits, stuck in one of his quiet slumps, Clara settles upon a boring conversation starter.

“You okay?” She asks. She knows that he isn’t. Besides a nasty blow to the head, she can tell that he has spent too much time alone. It was evident from the moment he pulled her into his TARDIS after she had thrown herself, on the brink of tears, onto her bed after a truly, _truly_ awful date. There were snuffed out candles littering the floor, papers scattered on the air, blackboards dashed with illegible, jagged scrawl. He raved, about shared nightmares and monsters and creatures that lived to hide, and she went along, obliging, and in the process somehow managed to retroactively ruin her date even further.

They have just said their farewells to Orson Pink, who, from a plastic soldier figurine coveted to the status of a family heirloom, and stories of time travellers passed down, seems without much room for doubt to be a descendent of hers. A descendent shared with Danny Pink. The way she sees it, this either means that time is about the crack right down the middle, or her future prospects are all tied off. What a shame it is, then, that Danny Pink hates her.

“Doctor?” Clara tries again, craning her neck to try and get a glimpse of his face. It is hidden in shadow. 

The Doctor is sitting hunched over on a leather armchair, which is just one of the many new affects that have appeared in the console room since its renovation. She likes it, despite her first impression; the bookshelves, the chalkboards, the blue lights and silver panelling. She likes him too, and she is a little ashamed now of how long it took for her to see the Doctor in his eyes, to recognise the spark, the shard. She should have known better than anyone, having seen his old faces before, but she felt as if she were grieving. She still does, in a strange way. The Doctor will never be the same.

Clara saw a side to him tonight that she hasn’t in quite some time. Intent, angry. Shouting at her, which she’s become used to, and learned to dismiss, but all the same, it was a first for this new face.

The Doctor hums low, and turns his new, old face towards the light.

“I asked if you were okay,”

“I’m always ok,” he answers quietly. “You’re the one who ruined your date.” It’s a shame, because she really does like Danny, and he would be the perfect sort of guy to date. First, he’s another teacher. She doesn’t have to think up some new, common-ground topic to talk about. They both love their jobs, the kids, and are sort of loners in their own right by virtue of youth and newness to the job. He’s all the regular stuff too, like tall and strong and handsome. Smart, brave, kind. Quiet and sensitive. Not likely to take her on a spontaneous trip to the corner store, let alone an alien planet, but you can’t have everything.

“Thanks,” Clara mutters, sarcastic. She backs away from the TARDIS console and walks up the metal steps to where the Doctor sits. There’s a black chalkboard on the wall nearby. Dashed upon it in crude, misshapen strokes is one word: _LISTEN_.

“So, what now?” Clara asks. She doesn’t like the way that the Doctor is staring into space, without a hint of a smile on his face. Was he always this sad? Clara thinks he was probably just better at hiding it, before. All of it tucked behind the veil.

“Clara,” he mutters. “Where did you take the TARDIS?”

To a barn. To a little boy who was scared of the dark and didn’t want to be a soldier like his brothers. Maybe she shouldn’t have stayed, but she couldn’t just leave him there, frightened, silently sobbing. She couldn’t just walk away, not when a child was crying.

“I told you not to ask that.” Clara reminds him sternly.

“Well, yes, but I was sort of hoping you’d change your mind. You seem to do that a lot.”

“Shut up.”

Looking at him, Clara wonders if he knows. He must at least suspect the truth. There aren’t many places in the universe that she would forbid him from visiting. Is it possible that he remembers that night? Dreams so often fade away, with only dark impressions left behind, like footprints on sand, washed away. But it became something, didn’t it? A hand in the dark, from behind, from beneath. He remembers it now as a nightmare. She looks around at the notes he’s been writing – scribbled onto blackboards and inked in book margins and scrawled over torn-out notebook sheets. 

“I don’t like not knowing things,” he says.

“I know.”

Neither does she. Ever the egomaniac, needy game-player. She knows what a spiral looks like, an obsession. She was the subject of that obsession, once. The impossible creature he was intent upon understanding. Sometimes she thinks his life is just a lonely trail of obsession after obsession, that his ample time is spent chasing the breadcrumbs of mysteries down and down, into the woods. Here is another to add to his ever-growing to-do list: what was the creature under little Rupert’s blanket? What were those creatures at the end of the universe? The monster, lurking in the corner of his eye, footstep never passing by…

“You never answered my first question,” Clara reminds him, her tone bright. She picks up one of the many pieces of paper strewn upon the desk inlaid in the TARDIS wall. Above, the lights fade, their orange glow receding to a background blue as their warmth saps away. His face is just as melancholic. Clara studies the page, assuming that the Doctor didn’t hear her. On the page, there are dark shapes scrawled in lead so thick it shines glossy silver. Formless masses, monsters or the remnants of runes, and illegible circular symbols surrounding them in angry, grey shapes.

“And what was that?” the Doctor says suddenly. Far too late to be considered a response. His eyes are closed. “You ask an awful lot of them.”

“How long have you been travelling alone?” Clara puts the page down and turns to him, arms folded. She fixes him with her teacher stare.

“Not sure,” he grumbles. “It’s not like I keep a calendar on board. Not as if I have any need to keep track,” he leans back, putting his feet up on the first rung of the metal railing enclosing the walkway, resting his hands behind his head. He glares out at the soft orange glow of the TARDIS core, and the light makes his eyes glisten yellow. “New regeneration cycle, possibly quite a lot of new regeneration cycles. There was quite a lot of energy flowing through that crack.”

“Are you worried about what you’re going to do now?” Clara asks, stepping closer.

“It’s not something that I’ve had cause to think about for a while. Trenzalore,” he rolls the word around his mouth with that new, gravelly accent of his. “Once we got there, it was supposed to be the end. We saw that it was the end, you and me, tomb and all. My own, decaying corpse… I would stand, for as long as I could, and then I would fall. And it was hard, it was long, but at least I knew it was going to end.” He stares, far and away. It’s been months, and this is the most he has spoken about the events on Trenzalore. He pops by when he finds something interesting to show her, even lets her pick every once in a while, but they don’t talk. Not properly. It’s as if he is trying to distance himself from it all. The grandeur, the prestige, the infamy. The legacy he tried so hard to erase but could never quite escape. The never go anywhere where the people know his name.

“Did you want it to, you know... end?”

He smiles, small and grim. “I honestly don’t know. I watched as generations of people in that town lived and died, fighting. Under my command. They were farmers and smiths and artisans, but they were soldiers by the end. More would have died, if I hadn’t fought off the Daleks. More still, if I’d let the Time Lords through,” his voice becomes a whisper, and he holds his elegant, long-fingered hands out in front of him, grasping an invisible ball. “And of course, that mystery I was chasing for so long, the cracks in time and space, all stemmed from one place, at one time. One people.” His people, trying to claw their way back to the universe from the cage in which the Doctor had trapped them. It would have been war all over again. That is what all those alien races, old enemies, had been desperately trying to prevent. The return of the Time Lords. To have them so close, whispering through the wall, and having to ignore the pleading of the place where he began.

“Was it tempting?” Clara asks. “To open the crack, let them through?”

“Of course, but I have no regrets. My duty is first to the universe, not to them.”

“And are you still looking?”

“Yes,” he sighs, “though I’m starting to think I might never find it.” She wished for that, didn’t she? Once upon a time. Part of her still does. “That might have been my only chance.”

Fingers splayed, he brings his hands up to cover his face. “But it still,” – he sighs again, weary – “it still bothers me. What they did on Trenzalore shouldn’t have been possible.” In a hurried movement, he flicks his hands from his face and swings his legs down from the railing with a clang. Grounded, he doesn’t look at her. “Sure, Time Lords are granted new regeneration cycles all the time. The truly elite, like Rassilon – practically a God – can regenerate indefinitely, according to legend. But for the rest of us it’s supposed to be a whole process, overwriting a core tenant of Time Lord biology. You don’t just the throw Artron energy spilling out of a fissure in space-time at a man and expect it all to work out.” The lines of his face are arranged in attack formation: a thinking face. A comical mask of concentration, failing to grasp at the lingering truth. Vestigial memories fade into the swamp.

“Maybe they’ve upgraded their tech?” Clara suggests.

“Maybe.” He shrugs. “Would be nice to ask, wouldn’t it?” As the engines sigh, a screwed-up ball paper rolls forlornly across the floor. A candle falls and begins to smoke.

The Doctor continues quietly, “What I have now, for all I know it could be infinity.” He looks scared. More scared than he was of the creatures at the end of the universe, crawling out form their eternal hiding place. “But why, what made them change their mind? For hundreds of years they sat there beyond that crack, within a fixed instant, and at the last moment they decide to call off the stalemate. Would have been nice if they’d developed a conscience a little earlier. It would have saved me the trouble of sticking around.”

“Maybe they knew you weren’t going to let them through, break the stasis cube. They finally accepted it, and they wanted to help drive the armies away. You saved them,” she reminds him. All thirteen. Should she be worried that there were no more than that?

The Doctor chuckles lightly to himself, sardonic.

“What?” Clara asks indignantly.

“I’m sorry Clara, but you don’t know Time Lords very well. Their persistence is absolute. They wouldn’t give up their only chance to return to this universe, back into the flow of time – they wouldn’t so drastically alter the _fixed_ future – out of some lingering sense of obligation. They aren’t nearly so kind.”

“Maybe I know them better than you think,” she tells him, looking out over the railing. The console spins, emanating a warm amber glow. Discs of silver revolve, etched with black Gallifreyan runes. She hasn’t yet asked him what they mean.

Clara continues, “Maybe you’re underestimating how much they care about you. How grateful they are.”

The Doctor raises his eyebrows, smirking cynically. “Maybe,” he mutters, but it’s clear that he doesn’t believe her.

“Or maybe,” she begins; cautious, guarded. “Maybe all it took was for somebody to ask them. Somebody to remind them of who you really are.”

Her admission hangs in the air for a moment, heavy, like a stone floating down to rest upon a riverbed. The Doctor’s eyes are wide, and he’s looking at her now. Properly looking, through iron eyes below arched brows. “Clara, what did you do?”

“I told them the truth. He’s the Doctor.” Her voice is clear and light, unwavering. Commanding. “He saved you all, so help him. Change the future.”

“Clara,” he turns away as if defeated, one hand loosely held over his mouth. “I don’t know whether I should be thanking you or telling you off.” Twice, she has gone to impossible lengths to save him, bending the laws of time. She sets these lofty standards for herself.

Clara scoffs. “You couldn’t tell me off if you tried.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t suppose I could.”

“Go on, say you’re a little bit proud.” 

The Doctor smiles wearily, and doesn’t. He shifts in his seat. “Either way, I’m faced with an awful lot of time ahead. There’s so much out there in the universe that I haven’t seen – multiple universes. Parallel worlds and in-between dimensions. Questions I’ve never even considered.” If mysteries do not present themselves willingly, he will create his own.

Clara steps across the narrow walkway to lean against the railing, alleviating some of the pressure on her feet, which have spent too long pressed into smart black heels.

“It’s called a crisis,” she tells him. “You’re having a crisis.”

“Yes, I should think so.”

“Like an old man thing. Beginning of possibly-infinite-life crisis.”

“You have experience with those do you?”

Teasing comes easy, and far easier than thinking about mortality, or a lack thereof. “Well, it’s all the same,” Clara shrugs, smiling to herself. “Flashy new vehicle, trying to reconnect with estranged family members. Getting really into philosophy for some reason.” The Doctor smiles: wide and sharky in a way that lights up his new eyes. “Or… getting lost in childhood memories. Childhood fears.” The grin slides off his face, and Clara regrets speaking the thought aloud. Big bad Time Lord, still afraid of the dark. They stew in silence for a moment.

“Could I ask you for another favour?” Clara broaches.

“I have a feeling you’re going to anyway.” His voice is soft and sombre again. His head tilts back, as if gravitating, towards the shadows.

“Could you drop me back on the same night? I really did mess up that date.” She twists her fingers together, biting her lip. She’s made an awful lot of mistakes tonight, and she thinks it’s time she got something right.

“If you bunged it up twice maybe it wasn’t meant to be, Clara.”

“Or maybe you’re just jealous,” she suggests, eyebrows raised.

He presses his lips into a small, fond line. “Not your boyfriend,” he reminds her. He insists upon that, yet he doesn’t seem too keen on letting her find one of her own. He teases her in a way that goes beyond fond, beyond endearing. Waiting in her bedroom in case she brings one home.

“When were you thinking?” The Doctor asks.

“Oh, maybe twenty minutes, half an hour. Give him a bit of time to stop being angry at me.”

The Doctor pushes himself up from the armchair with a grunt. “As you wish.”

The Doctor glides past her and down the stairs, hands upon the console controls with a slow grace that his previous incarnation lacked.

“And just one more thing,” Clara says, following him down to the ground level. “Promise you’ll check back with me every once in a while.”

“I’m not going to leave you waiting, Clara, don’t worry.” He pushes a lever on the console, and it fills the cold space with melodious beeps and chirps, like birds in the metal rafters. Clara figures that he isn’t counting the three weeks that he left her stranded in Glasgow. “At least once a week, I promise.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Clara lets the sentence hang, and the Doctor turns to her. “I mean you. Linear time for you, no more than a month on your own. Come back and see me, yeah? At least that often.”

He puffs out a breath, dashing back into action. Long, stilted movements, quickening pace. “I get side-tracked. I don’t think about time the same way that you do, with neat little measurements, ticking off the days. How am I supposed to remember how long an Earth month is?”

“If I can pop back to London after a month of travelling with you and get right on with it Monday morning then I think you can manage a visit every now and then.”

He shrugs her off. “I could easily lie about it.”

“And I could easily tell,” she retorts. “And then I’d have to put you in detention or something.” He chuckles, and she adds, “I’m serious. I don’t want you alone for too long.” She almost steps on an overturned candle.

The Doctor’s low laughter subsides, and he casts her an important look. “Clara, I don’t need a therapist.”

“Wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. I just want to make sure you’re doing okay.” Absently, she glances back at the upper level where the chalkboard stands, punctuating the notebook pages and open tomes littering the floor. 

“I’m always okay,” he says, for the second time.

“Or never okay. Okay’s relative.” Clara looks at the Doctor until he returns her gaze, unable to ignore the burning sensation on his back. For a moment, they stare at one another, both hopelessly stubborn. Twin iron resolves.

“You should probably blink more,” he tells her, his gaze fluttering away. “Your eyes will dry up and fall out.” She doesn’t deign that with a response.

The fluid motion of the ship shudders into stillness as the wheeze of the dematerialisation mechanism anchors them outside a restaurant in London. A good choice for a first date, if a little forward. She should let Danny know, it’s time she told him something nice. She wonders if the future, the one inhabited by Orson Pink, is set in stone. In turn, she wonders if she is okay with that.

She might be. She really does like Danny.

“Well, here we are,” the Doctor announces, lacklustre. “Just outside the restaurant twenty minutes after you left.”

“Great,” Clara beams. “Time to fix a date.” She rushes towards the doors. The pain in her feet is suddenly bearable again. She really needs this to work out. It could mean a real shot at a normal life, and the sort of boyfriend she can bring to Christmas dinner without… complications.

The Doctor says sternly, “Just so you’re aware, I will be informed if there’s a second.” Clara gives the Doctor a lazy salute and begins to open the doors. Before she can, the Doctor calls out to her; “and Clara?”

“Yeah?” The TARDIS doors are slightly ajar, and biting draft of night air rushes in. She wraps her dark coat tightly around herself.

The Doctor looks unsure, trapped, mind racing behind those glassy eyes as he tries to decide whether to say what he was originally intending to. He has his serious eyebrows on.

He settles with “sweet dreams,” and a broad, sinister grin.

Stepping out into the night, Clara is left to wonder whether the Doctor knows where the TARDIS landed after all.

Clara is sitting on the couch beside Danny, and trying to stay calm. He said he didn’t want to discuss it until she was calm, but she doesn’t think that’s ever going to happen. Even now, she feels a hot prickle of angry tears as her eyes begin to well, and her chest feels tight. Against the arm of the sofa, her fist is clenched.

The Doctor is still here, and that’s exactly the problem.

It has been nearly six months since she returned to 2014, and since he changed, but his change was surface level. The veil wasn’t hiding someone different, just more of the infuriating same. The Doctor is still here, and he hasn’t learned a single thing.

It was one of the worst days of her life, shut in a space station agonising over an impossible choice – because that was supposed to be his job, and it felt like he was delegating. Experimenting. _See how you like it._

All along, he knew which was the right choice to make, and still he insisted upon the arduous test. The Earth, or a blameless, beautiful creature. Weighing lives, weigh the vote, and choose right. She isn’t his pupil, she’s his friend – and she isn’t one of the everyday people, predictable and blind. She sat with him when he was just a child and whispered a story to him in the dark. Perhaps today was some twisted sort of revenge, to put her back in her place – because what makes her different from little Courtney Woods, in the end? Just a child, and she should be thankful that he is extending himself to humour her, to make her feel special. Lying to her. Even now, she doesn't know. She can't tell when he's lying. 

Alongside her rage, the TV blares feebly. Some sort of crime drama, where the good guys always win, and the bad guys are easily identifiable despite the sense of intrigue the story attempts to conjure up. It’s never aliens behind it all, which is a nice change, if a little unrealistic.

Danny was right in telling her to wait, to think it all through, because she’s beginning to identify something that is lurking beneath her anger, deeper, drowned out by her surface-level rage. She is, begrudgingly, beginning to realise that her anger is a convenient excuse to make the choice easier. The choice between life and the Doctor. 

It was so exhausting to lie to Danny, to have someone in her life close enough to question sudden suntans and hair growth, unwarranted weariness or hunger or confusion. It was reliving when he discovered the truth, but still the Doctor stands between them like an angry, Scottish wedge. It would be easier if the Doctor made an effort not to hate Danny so much, and though she expects that some of it stems from a complex sort of jealousy, the rest is projection, and reflection. He sees himself in Danny, in the ex-soldier – the kind-hearted, stern-willed man who loves to teach. 

Being angry is easy, because the anger chooses for her. If she tries her very best to only see the worst – the monster, the shard of ice driven through his hearts – the choice becomes clear. The mystery, now solved, is just a girl, and there’s nothing impossible about her. A stupid human girl that he can show off in front of, make substance-less speeches to, all so he can revel in the awe she radiates. She will not be that – the gentle pat on the back when the world is saved. She deserves more. 

The Doctor still sees himself as separate from his chosen home. They are ghosts to him, and their time is elastic, for him to bend and stretch and change. A toy, a game – and he finds them all so fascinating. So predictable. They are like specimens behind the glass, far away, for him to prod, to observe. But the Doctor isn’t on Gallifrey anymore. Until he finds it again, the Earth is his home. He walks their Earth, and breathes their air, and for as long as he does, he will be one of them.

Part of her wants him to come back, because it was a terrible way to end things. Equally, she never wants to see his stupid old face again. 

“Danny,” Clara says, leaning her head against his shoulder. He hums, low is his chest. She feels the sound vibrating through the side of her head. “I think I’m calm now.”

“You sure about that?” he asks jokingly. “You look like you’re winding up for a punch.” Clara relaxes her clenched fist deliberately, untensing taught, white muscles. 

“Calm as I’ll ever be.”

“Okay,” he humours her, and switches off the TV. The silence is soft, fuzzy, calm. Outside, car horns blare softly beneath the mumbling texture of gently spitting rain. It makes the warmth inside, the plush orange sofa and electric hearth, all the more comfortable. Danny shifts his head to look down at her. “How do you feel?” 

“I feel… betrayed,” she begins, muttering into his sweater. “I think this,” – against her will, her fingers clench against the arm of the chair again – “all this has been building up for a while. It’s all just a game for him. The Earth, it’s just a playground, and he changes history all the time, except when he doesn’t, and he never explains _why_. And maybe it seems like a small thing to finally set me of, but –”

“Potentially the end of the entire world, but your small and my small are pretty different.” 

“Oi, no interrupting,” she says, face pressed down into a sarcastic frown. Danny smiles softly at her. He has a way of doing that; softening, with his big black eyes and warm smile. Nothing like the Doctor, with his angles and eyebrows and ice-blue stare. 

“Is that all that’s been bothering you?” Danny asks. “About the travelling, I mean.” 

Clara frowns again, though the edges of her mouth curl up in a smile, because she doesn’t understand how Danny is able to read her so well. He has every expression mapped out, every thought. No need for telepathy. “No,” she concedes. “I suppose not.”

Danny raises his eyebrows, prompting her. Patient, expectant. 

“It’s getting hard, you know,” Clara sighs, “doing both. I feel like my life is just flying away. I’m almost spending more time out there than I am here, on average. I’m going to die so fast,” she chuckles, but it’s forced. It really does worry her. “And I love it, I love it so much out there, but I’m not some directionless twenty-four-year-old wanting to go find myself or whatever.” She hesitates, discovering the truth for herself as she says it. “I’ve found her, I think, and she’s here. You know,” – she nudges Danny with her elbow, a cynical smile on her face – “with you.” 

“And being angry at him makes it easier to stop,” Danny finishes, far more succinctly than she would have been able to put it. 

“Got it in one,” Clara whispers. She turns her gaze from Danny to the blank TV in front of them. A black mirror, and aren’t they just the picture of domestic bliss? Long day at work, feet up, watching telly. She feels safe.

She feels sure.

“But he really was being awful,” she says, to her reflection in the screen. “We used to be so similar. I would just go on with whatever he said, because he’s the two-thousand-year-old alien, and I’m, you know, not.”

Danny nods gently, then hesitates. “Wait, two-thousand?”

“Pretty sure I told you that, yeah.”

He looks down at her, wide-eyed. “I thought you were exaggerating. You know, at least a little bit.”

Clara smirks. “Nope.” She gave Danny a quick rundown, artfully omitting the broad strokes of universe-ending wars and thousand-year sieges. To him, they were just travellers, knocking about the universe like tourists. On a good day, that’s all they were. 

“But I’m so lucky, right?” Clara says, and again she addresses her reflection. The person she needs to convince. “I’d be stupid to give this up, because I’ve had the time of my life, I really have.” And she was the perfect damsel, the impossible girl. She broke the laws of time to save him, split into all those echoes. She was by his side on his darkest day, and helped him rewrite his terrible past. She stared into a fissure in time and begged his people to save him, and she watched them tear the sky asunder in a flurry of blistering gold. It was incredible and gruelling, beautiful and sad. Both, mingled into a wealth of experience that has changed her profoundly. Clara whispers, and finds that she is almost in tears as she admits the truth to herself, “But I just can’t do it anymore.”

Danny puts his arm around her shoulders, hugging her close. “I know exactly how you feel.” She generally doesn’t like it, these army metaphors of his, but she’s starting to appreciate their merit. Pushing her too hard, ordering her around, lying; all of this the Doctor has done, and more.

“Ok, how about this,” Danny says gently, “when he comes back –”

“No, Danny, he’s not coming back,” she says, and the hot, angry tears are back. “I bloody screamed at him to stay away for good.”

Danny smiles knowingly, cynically. “He’ll come back. And when he does, you should tell him what you’ve told me, maybe try and end things on a better note. I know how much you care about each other.” Clara knows he doesn't like it, the depth of their care, but unlike the Doctor, Danny generally keeps his jealousy hidden. Generally. Sometimes.

Soon, it won’t matter anyway, because that chapter of her life is coming to a close. She ran away with a spaceman, and everything happened, and now it’s over. She’s committing, finally pulling her head out of the clouds – out of the same indecision and guilt born of kindness that kept her caring for Angie and Artie for over a year – and committing to life.

“How did you get to be so wise?” she asks Danny, repeating what she told him earlier that day, when he managed to talk her down from the height of her anger.

Danny’s mouth curls into a proud half-smile as he fishes for the remote and turns the TV back on. The bright, cool light is comforting in its sting, and Clara nestles her head deep into the fabric of his jumper, her hand upon the sofa arm finally relaxed. 

She thinks she really does love him. 

**The Time Vortex, ∞**

The operative is riding the high of an operation well done. Self-professed time travellers messing around with the fabric of the universe, hired guns sporting cheap-and-nasty vortex manipulators tasked with preventing a particularly crucial political assassination. Operative #9613 put a staser bullet in the time agents, and one in Emperor Krelan Stanisulous the IV for good measure. Time must stay its course; else chaos will engulf the universe. It’s all for the greater good; every blast fired, every building brought down, every planet obliterated. 

The operative is an instrument of the Division, only the Division doesn’t exist, so officially speaking he doesn’t either.

The operative doesn’t have a name, not even a face he can rely on to stay for long (though he’s had this one for a while now, longer than any of the others). He doesn’t see the point in either of them; names or faces. They hold no meaning, because who you are is what you do. It’s what you fight for. Your face is a veil, and your name is a promise. Operative #9613 is promised to the Division.

He is back on his squadron’s TARDIS, the ten of them piloting the ungainly ship. The operative’s father envisions a future in which such machines will be far more efficient, perhaps even independent. As of now, their mechanisms are finicky, and their traversals through the time vortex turbulent. 

The ten pilots are silent, identically uniformed and stolid. They aren’t supposed to talk. Generally, they talk regardless, just not to him. Some of them know who he is – the son of a founder – but there’s another reason for their wariness. His difference hangs about him like an aura, palpable in a way he is yet to learn to disguise. He’s not very good at talking either. He gets his words muddled up, thoughts coming out jumbled and in the wrong order. Usually by then the verbal conversation has moved on, and telepathic subspace returned to its usual impenetrable state.

The Division hails from a planet called Gallifrey, though that name was only recently chosen, going by the operative’s personal timeline. A grand new empire rising from what was once a scorched, barren waste, ruled by an elite class of citizens called Time Lords. These elite citizens are genetically superior to their Shobogan brethren, coveting refined telepathic abilities, an innate sense of time and higher dimensional planes, and the ability to regenerate their bodies upon death. Their three fearless leaders established order across what was once a chaotic, unreadable universe, allowing their empire to oversee all of time and space in a vast, interconnected web. Although time beyond the boundaries of their planet is subject to strict laws so as to maintain order, Gallifrey itself is like the central node of that vast web. The eye of the storm, in which paradox is an unavoidable fact of existence. The future necessitates the past, both flimsy categories constantly being altered and predicted by the powerful computer buried beneath their capital: the Matrix.

The founders of the empire gazed into the vortex of time, and unlocked the secrets within, bringing peace, stability, and governance to the universe after a long, dark age. A time of shadows and magic. 

Although the Time Lords are a peaceful people, intent first and foremost upon observing the fabric of reality as it runs its orderly course, sometimes the unenlightened hit a snag along the way, and threaten to unravel the meticulous structure of it all. That’s what the Division is for. Correcting the timeline, grasping the threads of that vast web and tugging them back into place. The organisation is timeless – it has to be, to operate outside the laws that govern it. Its operatives have unrestrained jurisdiction across all of time and space, and are free to visit any version of Gallifrey from the launch of the Matrix to the cusp of its inevitable degradation, as the universe devolves once more into old chaos. Such is the unfortunate nature of entropy. 

The TARDIS console room is circular, with a black, claw-like structure enclosing the central pillar of machinery. The lighting is red-tinted and dim, and metal cooling vents breathe dregs of steam into the upper stratosphere of the high, domed ceiling. Operative #9613 stands at his designated wedge of console. His fingertips are pressed into the soft flesh-like substance of the ship’s telepathic circuits, each operative equipped with a crown of dark wiring and cold metal electrodes that connects their minds to one another, allowing them to pilot the ship collectively. 

The TARDIS is alive; part mechanical, part organic. Its temporal engines are powered by a dying star, suspended in the moment before its collapse, trapped within the ship’s core. Its consciousness is afforded by a form of intelligent energy – Artron, they call it – dwelling stretched across eleven planes of existence. The net of piloting minds focus beam-like on a precise set of temporal coordinates. Gallifrey, sometime in the future relative to the operative’s original time zone. As a precaution, the operatives will be isolated within the citadel’s Division base, unable to glimpse the city outside. If it is deemed a risk, any agents hailing from a past instance of Gallifrey, a few links back along the great chain, will have their memories erased to counteract the ensuing paradox.

Upon landing, operative #9613 senses the slightly altered quality of the air that comes with a different time zone. Older and richer and wiser; a more densely populated city. With the shielding that encompasses the Division base, that is all he can glean of the future of his empire, thriving beyond the walls.

The interior of the Division base looks as it always does, unchanged across the ages. It is locked in a frozen temporal state, a safeguard offered due to its uniquely sensitive operations. 

Marble floors and golden, metal corridors. No windows, just the soft, white glow of cyclic Gallifreyan runes carved into the walls of sparse halls, where the operative’s footfalls echo crisply through the still air. The building is illuminated in clear, unbroken light from all sides. There are no shadows.

Division operatives are masters of telepathic control, keeping their thoughts sequestered and defended from prying eyes. They wear unfathomable expressions, keeping their emotions repressed behind a dull stare. Their skills in attack are equally as refined, able to flood the minds of low-level sentient beings with enough telepathic discord to drive them to madness in a matter of moments. Smaller minds can be easily controlled as well, manipulated, persuaded, even puppeteered from afar. They are similar to the old magics performed by the ancient Pythian order, only refined to a mathematical precision, and bolstered by technical apparatus.

The ten agents walk briskly, in synced, single-file step, to the main hall to receive their next assignment. It is unlikely that they will ever see one another again. Given Gallifrey’s long timeline – the infinite instances of the base in which they might next find themselves – crossing paths again is unlikely. Even if they were to meet, their memories would likely be altered by then, and with faces changing with every casualty, and a discouragement of personal relationships of any affect, they may well not recognise one another. 

Glimpsing the future, weaving through one's own personal timeline, altering the past and persisting through paradox – all are potentially maddening for the traveller, and potentially cataclysmic for the universe. Precaution must be taken. Agents of the Division are tools, extensions of the empire’s mighty hand. They are blank slates, and as such memories are wiped and rearranged after more sensitive missions so as to preserve order. Memories are more than images held in the mind. They are a force; electrical signals between synaptic receivers that can be shared, and thereby held in the collective consciousness of an entire planet. Memories are powerful, and wiping them wipes away any contingencies that might arise from paradox. Like loose threads of the web, trimmed, tied off, tucked away. 

The operative expects he will be permitted to keep the memory of his most recent mission. Examining the corrected threads surrounding the event, he sees none hanging, nothing that might unravel if provoked. However, it is not his job to decide these things. There are observers of the web of time far more skilled than him. 

Operative #9613 places his handprint on one of the bio-scanners set up at regular intervals along the entrance to the main hall. A dark pad, cool to the touch, that traces over his hand in a stream of red light. Ordinarily, the screen would flash with a number indicating the TARDIS he would board to depart to his next assignment, and upon boarding, the necessary mission intel would be uploaded to his mind for assessment. Instead, the screen flashes with the words: _report to Commander_.

Not just the regiment head, the _Commander_. That could mean a promotion, though he doubts it. He is by no means a highly skilled agent. It could also mean reprimand, demotion, perhaps even decommissionment. He hopes it isn’t the latter. He really doesn’t want to work for the CIA. 

The operative watches in dismay – shielded, of course, and without a single slip in his features – as the other agents file off to their next assignments, entering the TARDIS bays on the far sides of the hall. Instead, he continues forwards toward the main offices. In his head, he sees the place mapped out, the room where he is expected marked for him and drawing him towards it through psychic gravitation.

A regiment describes a set of agents recruited at a particular block of time during Gallifreyan history. Thus, his is one of the first. The commander presides over a larger section of time and all the regiments within it. He knows that his commander presides over Gallifrey’s earliest age. It is elating to know that there are a great many commanders, each presiding over a future age of the Gallifreyan empire. So many bountiful millennia yet to come. 

The Commander’s office is large, a singular room beyond the rows of smaller offices housing the regiment heads. He has been in this room only once before, when he was first recruited to the Division, with his father by his side. He has often wondered if this is another reason for the dislike so many of his colleagues seem to feel for him without warrant. Simple nepotism. It’s all the more reason to prove himself worthy of his position. 

Two guards stand outside the door to the commander’s office, armoured in dark red, their chest-plates emblazoned with the Seal of the Founders. The door is imposing; hewn from study, polished metal and dark wood, which is a rare sight on the Gallifrey of his own ancient time, where trees have barely been reintroduced to the revitalised soil.

The operative nods to one of the guards, and a bulb-shaped camera affixed above the door scans him in a flash of penetrating red. The doors open of their own accord to reveal a sparse, bright room with a low, rounded table. A figure sits behind it, dressed in the crisp black coat of the Division uniform. The back wall is decorated with golden runic patterns, more artisanal than informative. The telepathic component of the words infuses a feeling of looming authority and grandeur in the back of his mind. 

The Commander is a woman, presumably with a name, though he will never know it. She smiles perfunctorily at the operative as he approaches the desk. He doesn’t sit until she nods at him, holding out an arm to indicate the chair opposite her. 

“Operative number 9613,” she says cordially. Her welcoming demeanour is entirely fabricated. Any true delight, or anything that might exist beneath it, is disguised behind a stoic mask. Her eyes are a piercing green. 

“Commander.” The operative acknowledges her with a downturned head. 

“We have received a rather unusual request from the High Council. A mission for which they believe your exemplary skills will be most suited.”

It causes the operative great strain not to betray his pride. Not a hint of a smile, not a thought of happiness. He is exemplary. It’s the first he’s heard of it.

“The request comes from a time far in Gallifrey’s future, long after the Division as an initiative will be discontinued, no doubt in favour of a more efficient and effective system.”

Sometimes the operative wonders how much the commanders are permitted to know of Gallifrey’s future. The operative is raptly curious about what new systems might be employed in the highly advanced culmination of the empire. It is difficult to imagine, from his early origins, what more the empire could possibly accomplish, and what great system could replace the elegance of the Division. They are heights he can scarcely imagine.

“In later stages of the empire,” the Commander continues, “a machine is invented for the purpose of extracting persons from their timeline in the microsecond before their demise. It is useful for study, record-keeping, interrogations. I am sure you see its merits.” The operative nods to show his understanding. “In an extremely irregular turn of events, an extracted subject has escaped Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, and is currently wreaking havoc on the established timeline. Our help has been requested in apprehending the fugitive and delivering them back to Gallifrey for immediate reintegration into the timeline.” Capture target alive. It’s a common mission directive; a single rogue entity falling out of sync with the rest of reality, whether of their own nefarious volition or through unfortunate happenstance. The cause of the anomaly doesn’t matter, so long as order is restored. 

“A solo operation, Commander?” the operative inquires. 

“It seems so, 9613.” 

“Is infiltration predicted to be necessary?” 

“The task should be approached with stealth, yes. Extracted beings are not bound by the same physical laws as others, as they exist outside of time. Your telepathic abilities, for instance, will have no effect. There are no electrical signals in the brain to intercept, to direct. The consciousness is held in a suspended moment. A copy, or template, ironed onto a copied biological shell. Beings such as that are not intended to persist for long.” 

“If it is not improper, Commander, may I ask why I have been requested to undertake this mission? I am a junior recruit and this seems a sensitive and unique operation.” He is glad of the opportunity, of course, but it seems a curious decision. Surely an operative of a higher rank, hailing from a regiment more experienced in the Gallifreyan ways of the far future, would be better suited to the task.

“Ordinarily, this query would be improper, but I am inclined to share your curiosity on this matter. Some things are not to be known, especially when it comes to the decisions of the High Council. They would not have called upon you if they did not know it to be necessary.”

“Of course.”

“That will be all, operative. Collect your mission equipment and proceed to TARDIS bay 783. Good luck to you.” 

The operative holds back an array of further questions. As she said, some things are not to be known.

“Thank you, Commander,” he says curtly, and takes his leave. 

Operative #9613 journeys back past the regiment offices to the main hall, puzzling over his new assignment. Solo missions are rare for someone of his rank, and seldom so complicated as a stealth infiltration. He will be required to interface with highly advanced Time Lord technology as well – far above any First Age tech he has been permitted to remember thus far. Dwarfing his nerves is his excitement, though he doesn’t delude himself in the belief that he will be allowed to remember the incursion. In his experience, it is better to concentrate on the job to come; to relish in every detail of the mission, and when required, let it go. 

A smaller room beside the main hall functions as an equipment distribution centre, arming operatives with everything from weaponry to affectations of target cultures, allowing one to blend in if necessary. Often, stealth is not a requirement unless the incident will be witnessed on a large scale, one that cannot be scrubbed from observing minds without further, spiralling complications. 

The equipment packs are loaded into clear capsules sent along from all manner of places in the city – from armouries to the fabrication engines of the Matrix, which convert recycled matter into any object that might be required to increase a mission’s likelihood of success. His own equipment capsule, sent down through the vast network of pneumatic tubes that lead to the collection room, contains a curious bag made from a rough, dark material. Inside is a collection of garments that he presumes are native to the temporal coordinates of his mission. A red shirt, blue tough-skinned pants, and a soft dark jumper. The materials are cheaply made and insubstantial. They will offer no protection, though the operative hopes he won’t be needing any. 

Operative 9613 journeys to his allocated TARDIS with nine other agents, none of whom he recognises. Upon entering the ship, he stops momentarily at the threshold as introductory information concerning his mission is telepathically transmitted through the signal relays overhead. Knowledge washes over him in a current of coalescing ideas, galvanic and pleasantly cool. A planet colloquially known as Earth; a region called Utah, in the year designated by the local wildlife as 1994. In addition to perfunctory facts and figures, the operative is given an overview of Earth’s history and culture, compressed into an instantaneous telepathic message, dialect, mannerisms, etiquette and the like. Unneeded knowledge will be wiped upon mission completion. 

His fellow operatives pass beneath the arch, and receive orders of their own, information distilled from the vast, timeless well of knowledge collected by the Matrix in its study of the cosmos.

The ten operatives scan their bio-prints at the console to register their arrival, and don their wire crowns, priming their minds for take-off.

Operative #9613 loves travelling. His childhood was quiet, and slow, and sheltered. Painful, sometimes, but for good reason. He had a gift that he wanted to share. Now that he has, the universe is finally open to him, to explore and correct. To save. The Division affords him the sense of unity and belonging that he went without for so long, while he was kept away from other children because of his differences, his danger. Now he is altered, improved, and allowed the chance to live among the rest of what he now calls his kind. 

His stop is the first. The other operatives are split into subgroups or other solo missions and will exit the craft along a pre-programmed set of landing locations, carrying out their allotted missions within a shared sector of spatial and temporal coordinates before being collected by the craft once more upon their completion. Contrary to protocol, Operative #9613 will not be accompanying them on the return trip. If all goes well, he will have acquired transport of his own.

The path that the net of minds forge is long and winding. They journey far into the future, skirting past hordes of flaring, dying galaxies as time is pressed thin. They arrive in an empty corner of an empty galaxy, all but devoid of conscious life. A sad little pocket of the universe.

The planet Earth is small; a mass of blue waters streaked with misshapen swaths of land and covered in wisps of white clouds. 

The TARDIS shields itself in invisibility when it lands. Operative #9613 tentatively removes his piloting interface, scans his bio-print upon the console to confirm his exit, and with a slight shock notices that all nine of his comrades are staring at him. He is unable to identify the emotion or motive behind their stares, expertly hidden as they are, but he can guess. Jealousy. A junior recruit entrusted with a solo infiltration mission in a barely explored corner of the universe. This is rare, new territory, and they want the experience, and proceeding recognition for themselves. Concealing his smugness, the operative nods solemnly to the onlookers, and takes up his bag from the equipment hold. His intel informs him that in the local dialect, it is called a backpack. The metal panel of the door slides across, the atmosphere outside rushing in to meet the compressed, sterile air inside the ship with a hiss.

Operative #9613 steps out into the sunlight, and the new world beyond. 

What awaits him is a vast, featureless desert, the monotonous orange broken only by a peculiar, dust coated building. Rusted, dilapidated, oil sitting slick and black in bountiful wells beneath the ground. He searches his newly deposited file of foreknowledge. Gas station, his intel calls the place. The runes this species deign to call a language, decorating a large sign in front of the building, are small and stout and dreadfully plain. The sky is of a cool hue – blue, giving way to soft lilac and muted orange as its singular sun begins to set. 

The operative sets about rooting himself upon this new planet, studying its curvature, its speed of rotation, the tilt of its axes and strength of its magnetic field. He gazes further, to its position upon its orbit and the alignment of the surrounding stars. The air is empty. Lonely, without the comforting hum of background telepathic interference that is ever present on his home planet. How isolated these creatures must be. 

Slinging his backpack – as he’s learning to call it – over his shoulders, Operative #9613 makes his way towards the gas station. Behind him, he senses an infinitesimal fluctuation in the air that indicates his ship’s departure. He has been dropped off some way from the town where the fugitive is hiding in their stolen TARDIS, in case temporal anomalies such as a time-ship landing close by were to set off the machine’s defences. Although unlikely, it may be possible for an exceptionally clever thief to reprogram a TARDIS for its own needs.

Making his own way into town will give him an alibi – evidence of his natural, unplanned arrival – if the fugitive happens to be vigilant. 

His downloaded intel will reveal itself on a need-to-know basis, as is protocol. Behind the firewall there exists substantial knowledge concerning Earth culture, extracted from the Matrix, and sitting in the psychic reserves of his augmented mind. In a similar vein, he expects that the technical skills required to fly a future-age TARDIS will reveal themselves once he takes control from its thief.

As Operative #9613 approaches the gas station, he passes empty pumping stations and a large, thrumming freezer where bags of ice are advertised for purchase at what his intel informs him is a reasonable amount of currency in his current time and place. The faded white walls are inked with strange, curved markings made with colourful paints. 

Inside, the space is crammed with cheap plastic shelves stocked with boxes and packets covered in gaudy colours and illustrations. Processed capsules of food and drink. He’s seen cultures such as this before, wherein the planet is ruled first and foremost by a vast, complex, interconnected marketplace. The primary role of citizens is not to further the empire in scientific or militant power, but to consume. Such systems have always seemed rather counterintuitive to him. 

A tinny chime rings out as the operative pushes the dirty glass door open. The clerk – a tired old man, the fat under his chin bulging over a too-tight shirt collar – raises an eyebrow at him in surprise.

“Evening,” he grumbles, a bemused expression on his face, as if he is holding back a bout of laughter.

“Evening,” the operative replies in a clear voice. His intel informs him that this is a customary greeting, though acknowledging the time of day seems redundant. It isn’t something one tends to forget.

Of course, the operative is still clothed in his Division uniform. High-collared coat, its sharp lapels embellished with red and gold; a crisp white shirt fastened with a black broach at the throat, his facial features accentuated with red accents and dark eyeliner. Perhaps such an appearance is not customary, though he can find no indication of this in forthcoming information. No matter. Soon enough, the clerk won’t remember seeing the operative at all. 

Operative #9613 spies a symbol at the far side of the room that translates itself to ‘restroom.’ Somewhere he can change into his supplied clothing. 

The restroom is grimy and old, with cracked blue tiles and flickering lights. He has prepared for missions in far less hospitable places.

The operative changes into what he learns are called jeans and a hoodie, and washes off his makeup. His supplied bag also contains a leather wallet filled with Earth currency. These future-Gallifreyans have certainly been thorough in the supplies they have provided. 

Surveying himself in the cracked, spotted mirrors affixed to the tiled wall, the operative cross-references his appearance with the average Human of his age found in this area and time zone. He notices a curious divide in the chosen presentation of male and female Humans, which is a trend he has observed in other sexually dimorphic species. It is generally a sign of primitiveness. 

The change in appearance that his new outfit affords is jarring. Observing himself now, without the high, dark collar, and pigments accentuating his angular features, he looks far younger. Wide-eyed and childish. He doesn’t like it. The operative spent a great many years being a scared child – many more years than the average person, due to his particular gifts. He has no desire to return to such a state; _monitored, trapped, terrified_. He buries the memory. There may be no one here to pick up on the telepathic fluctuations that his emotions conjure up, but it’s always good practise to keep them in check. 

To distract himself, the operative decides upon a name. It would be optimal to choose something statistically likely within his current setting. He doesn’t trust his instincts well enough to offer his own creative input. Human beings typically have at least two names. He skims common first names: Michael, Christopher, David, James, John. None of them are particularly interesting. By far, the most common second name is Smith.

John Smith, he decides. It will do for a name. It’s not as if the operative can remember his own. 

The newly-named John Smith folds his Division uniform and stows it in his backpack, along with his staser pistol. Such a weapon won’t be of any use against the fugitive. 

John exits the restroom and thinks about how best to reach the stolen time-ship. He has the coordinates locked away in his mind; a town called Kanab about 20 miles South. On the dusty highway outside, he sees a large transport truck drive past. Perhaps he can commandeer another such vehicle, or persuade a local to take him where he needs to go.

But there is something he has to do before he leaves: clean up his tracks. The Division is a top-secret organisation, and although technically the CIA is as well, information about its operations has been leaked to the wider universe piecemeal, so as to appease the masses. This led to regulations being put in place due to pressure from outside forces ignorantly opposed to being meddled with by the CIA, thereby allowing the Division to continue operations unnoticed and unobstructed in its shadow. As unlikely as it is for the old Human clerk to report anything to the galactic authorities, protocol states that clean-up is required. No contingencies, not a single loose thread, can be allowed to persist. 

John loiters around the shelves for a moment, distracted by the brightly coloured packaging. Buying something would give him a good excuse to get close to the clerk. Absently, he picks out a flat, red packet. The plastic is shiny and metallic, and the writing upon it says _Kit-Kat_. It probably counts as gathering mission-critical intel to immerse himself in the local culture, and with that flimsy assertion John takes the food packet and walks up to the Clerk’s desk.

A wall of clear plastic blocks off the clerk’s section of the shop, and on the wall behind him hangs an assortment of primitive firearms. Messy devices that fire metal bullets and make an awful racket. The operative has been required to use them before, to make assassinations believable in less-advanced societies, but he has never liked them much. 

The clerk addresses John in a gruff, mocking voice. “Thought you were going to use my bathroom and run off like some freeloader.”

“Just this, thanks.” John places the Kit-Kat onto the counter, plucking an appropriate phrase from his mind. 

“Sixty cents.”

John pulls his wallet out of his jeans pocket and fumbles around for the right coins. Best not to rob the man.

“It’s getting dark, kid,” the clerk continues. “Where’re you headed?”

“Kanab.”

“You could probably catch a lift, most people driving by here are headed towards the border.”

“Right.” John places the coins on the counter-top, his arm resting nearby. When the clerk goes to take the money, John snaps into action and grabs his wrist before the man can pull back. His muscles freeze up, and John extends his reach; feelers splayed and searching, tracing along nerves and reaching towards synapses. Realigning, rewriting. There was no strangely dressed visitor, and no prickling disturbance in the air as a time-ship landed mere feet away. The operative reaches back further than is strictly required, but he’s never looked inside a Human before. It’s bound to be interesting. 

Tendrils stretch beyond their natural extent, bending, twisting. He pushes the mind forwards through time. Interesting, how their thoughts form; repetitive, singular, base. Memory fades so very fast, sensation barely clung to, dreams never remembered. Apparently, the clerk is going to die from cardiac arrest in just a few year’s time.

John breaks the connection before he feels any of the unpleasantness of death for himself. When John pulls his hand away, the man is dazed, and will remain so for an hour or two. He clutches his head, and looks at John without seeing. 

“Thanks for this,” John says, snatching up the food packet. He doubts the clerk can hear him. 

On the roadside, John puts an arm out in a gesture his intel informs him will be likely to attract a willing escort to Kanab.

John begins trying in earnest to inhabit his prescribed character. He decides that it is best to appear unthreatening. Switching between intimidating and benign is an important skill for an operative, one that is accentuated by the psychic aura that one constructs and holds around themselves like a pheromonic pall. 

Soon enough, just as the stars become visible in the clear, dark blue of this planet’s sky, a truck stops to let him board. John is greeted by a middle-aged man with a thick moustache and droopy eyes. The driver doesn’t seem too intent upon talking, and only asks for a destination, which suits John just fine. John offers to pay him for the ride, but he refuses. 

During the short drive, John gazes out at the flat desert plains, spotted with far-off canyons and mountain ranges. Sand and rock and balls of dark, dry scrub, as far as the eye can see. It reminds him of the way that Gallifrey used to look, a long time ago. _Bright view from the window, hands against the glass. Hot chest, aching muscles, boredom like an itch, and fear..._

Childish fear. John shuts it away. 

He unwraps the food packet titled _Kit-Kat_ and takes a tentative bite. It’s almost entirely composed of sugar. Totally insubstantial. He can taste the assembly line in every bite. The sugar is welcome, with the flood of adrenaline it affords. 

John takes the idle time to get to know his target. He surveys all Matrix data concerning one Clara Oswald.

Born on Earth, in the United Kingdom, Blackpool, South Lancashire, 1986. Studied English Literature at the University of London. Worked as an English teacher at Coal Hill School for two years before turning up dead in a London alleyway. The incident was ruled as heart failure, considered anomalous for a healthy young woman.

Huge swaths of the woman’s file are redacted, entire subsections scrubbed from the records or classified for a higher degree of clearance. The amount of information collected on this woman is much larger than for the average human, yet anything out of the ordinary has been hidden. If it were crucial to the mission’s success, John reasons, he would have been given access. He can’t fathom the reason as to why she needed to be extracted, even if her cause of death concerned some extra-terrestrial accident – let alone how she managed to bypass Gallifreyan security, hijack an advanced TARDIS model, and evade immediate capture. 

It is ridiculous, what these lower beings think they can get away with. They scrap together their brutish, bootlegged temporal tech, start throwing themselves through the vortex, twisting themselves through the threads of time itself, and they expect the universe to remain robustly intact. They see space in three flat, dull dimensions, live pitifully short lives, and serve their base instincts like animals.

It’s bad enough having to chase down the alien empires, developing their own rudimentary, highly volatile and woefully inefficient time travel technology, having to halt the growth of their societies like pulling out weeds, suffocating sparks before they can become infernos. Worse, is one of these creatures stealing from Gallifrey, attempting to tame technology they can never hope to understand, butchering their elegant design in undoing all the hard work that the empire has done to keep the universe safe. It’s selfish, insolent, _idiotic_. 

John quells his anger. If he’s lucky he can take it for a spin later, once he has this Clara Oswald trapped on a course back to Gallifrey. 

Order will be restored, this little snag in the timeline straightened and corrected. These people can’t be trusted to exist unaided in the new universe that the Gallifreyan Founders have forged. It is a burden that his people must bear, for the simple fact that they are better.

And he _made_ them better. 

His people saved him, and raised him up, and this is his chance to pay them back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I reeeallllyyy struggled with the start of this chapter. I debated cutting out the whole echo-clara thing because it’s so long and mostly unrelated to the main story. But it's also really cool?? at least it could have been cool in the show and just wasn't. Like, was the great intelligence trying to get the doctor to steal a different tardis?? really?????? I like to think of it as he just pops up at different points where the doctor visits anyway and tries to take over the world or kill him, thereby changing the past and messing it all up, and the clara is the balance to that change. I've been rewatching the show and I got up to The Name of the Doctor and it does show one of the echo clara's growing up, so it's probably not intended that she just pops into existence at age 24 but also that doesn't make sense! does she just replace some other child in the womb?? her parents aren't there. I like to think that lil flashback was just implanted memories to make the timeline make sense, everyone's memories get altered because time is flexible like that. 
> 
> Also I’ve only listened to like 1 ep of Dark Eyes about a year ago, so I’m not sure how accurate my Molly and 8 are as characters. 
> 
> This wasn’t supposed to be a long story… like originally I had the echo Clara stuff and the Oswin in the diner stuff and the flashback/character study stuff as 3 separate fic ideas. But they’re all about Clara so I’ll just stick it in one. They connect thematically/slightly narratively anyway I promise. 
> 
> One thing I haven’t been able to decide on is Clara’s timeline. She’s 24 in the bells of st John, but by Deep Breath she’s 27. I’m not sure if the year is actually mentioned in s8 and 9, whether it corresponds to 2014/15, but season 7B is definitely 2013. So was Clara travelling with the doctor so often that she was like 2 years ahead by s8. Has time moved beyond the time of airing? (Which makes me think of Amy and Rory, but their timeline is a whole other problem)
> 
> also what do you think of my son? I made up some Division lore that will likely be contradicted soon enough haha


	4. Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An imposter, a choice, and a dream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, I go hog fucking wild.  
> This should definitely (probably) be the longest chapter. The first part got away from me because of all the dialogue.  
> And em if you're reading this I stole the last part from you sorta you'll see jghsfkghfdkj

**New York, 1946**

Clarissa can barely contain her excitement. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, gazing out the old windows to the gravel drive, expectant. For almost a year she has been working at the Graystark Hall Orphanage on the outskirts of New York, and in all that time they’ve never hosted such an important visitor. Clarissa stands in the entrance hall with her hands smartly tucked behind her back. Beside her is the orphanage Director, Mr Digbey, who is wearing his best suit for the occasion. 

“Won’t you stay still Miss Oswald,” he reprimands, curt. 

Clarissa obeys, hanging her head. “Sorry sir.”

The rest of the orphanage staff are busy setting up the dining hall for their visitor; pushing the long rows of dining tables against the walls and laying a rug across the floor for the children. It isn’t only a veritable celebrity they are hosting, but the press – journalists and photographers here to construct an article about the visit. Good press will mean more adoption offers from the city, more children sent away to better homes. That’s enough to have Mr Digbey sweating through his suit, adjusting his cuffs compulsively twice a minute, but Clarissa is excited for a different reason. 

There are a great deal of orphans in the country at the moment, along with parents left childless. The war may have been fought half a world away, but its disaster rippled out across the globe. Graystark Hall now houses a great many scared children, swapping half-true, embellished tales about great war machines, and an even more calamitous conflict on the horizon. The children are cared for by equally scared adults, tasked with palliating their nightmares. It does no good to tell the children that their fear is imagined, or that there is nothing in all the world to be afraid of. It does no good to lie to them. Clarissa tries to remind them how wonderful a thing fear can be, how it can make you strong, and quick, and powerful. The best way to combat any bad dream is with a story, and the stories that the children seem to love the most are those written by today’s honoured guest; Amelia Williams. 

Clarissa jumps as the gravel outside crunches beneath approaching tires. She darts to the long window beside the orphanage’s sturdy, dark-wood door. 

“Miss Oswald, come away from the window,” Mr Digbey snaps, though he is staring out at the drive just as intently. 

“Sorry sir,” Clarissa whispers, returning to her allotted position. Outside, a smart, black car stops, its sheen elegant under the muted sun. It is tailed by a van, no doubt stocked with photography equipment.

“Once I have greeted our guest, I will be going for an interview with the journalist – whoever it is they’ve sent. It will be left to you to entertain Mrs Williams, show her to where she will be reading for us today.” Mr Digbey doesn’t look at Clarissa as he relays his instructions for what must be the hundredth time this morning. She nods amicably. 

There is a crisp knock upon the door, and Mr Digbey flashes Clarissa a blazing, warning stare before straightening his lapels, clearing his throat, and going to answer it. 

Mrs Williams is forty, though in Clarissa’s opinion she looks far younger. Tall and pale, her red hair is curled loosely and styled with the pristine sophistication of a movie star. She is dressed in a smart button-up teal dress with a dark collar and long sleeves. Every aspect of her appearance, down to the way she holds herself, with a straight back and an upturned chin, is the very picture of elegance. Clarissa feels her cheeks redden with what can only be jealousy of her beauty. 

“Mrs Williams,” Mr Digbey says, his voice notably lower than usual. He holds out his hand.

“Director Digbey,” she replies, shaking his hand in a smooth, refined movement.

Digbey is rendered momentarily breathless. Mrs Williams raises her eyebrows. “Right, yes,” Digbey stammers, “Miss Oswald here has volunteered quite enthusiastically to show you to the dining room where you will be reading for the children today. I’m afraid I am wanted for an interview,” he wears a smug smile as he says this, once again adjusting his wrist cuffs. 

Alongside Mrs Williams, quite overshadowed by her dazzling entrance, is a man in a dark suit and hat holding a notebook and pen. “Pleased to make your acquaintance Mr Digbey,” he says, shaking Digbey’s hand. “Johnson. I’ll be writing your piece in the Times. The photographers will ready their equipment in the meantime.”

“Very good,” Digbey says importantly, leading the journalist over the threshold and towards his upstairs office. 

Clarissa watches them go, using the action as an excuse to turn her head away, screw her eyes shut, and gulp down any encroaching nerves. Turning back around, she finds Mrs Williams waiting for her expectantly. 

“Mrs Williams, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Clarissa beams up at her, and quickly realises that she is unable to contain her awe. “I just love your stories,” she bursts out. “I read them to the children every day and they all love them – the young ones, the older ones. I don’t know how you come up with such fantastic tales! Aliens and cities underground and travelling through time – you possess the genius of Wells with a dash of whimsical, childlike wonder. The children were so excited when I told them you were coming.” She shakes the author’s hand vigorously, nerves forgotten. 

“Well, thank you Miss Oswald, I’m glad to hear it.” Mrs Williams smiles, bemused.

“Oh, Clarissa will do just fine ma’am, and I do apologise for talking your ear off.”

“No apology necessary, and in that case Amelia will do fine for me,” she replies, serene. Her voice reminds Clarissa of song, or sea breeze. There goes that blush again. 

“Very good m – Amelia,” she catches herself. “Please come this way.”

Sweeping her arm forwards, she ushers Amelia into the entrance hall, leaving the door open for the small band of photographers currently unloading their equipment from the van outside. Amelia gazes up at the ceiling; the chandelier casting glittering points of light onto the wood-paneled walls, and the well-used staircase leading to the upper levels. 

“If you’d follow me into the dining hall,” Clarissa chirps, doing her best to walk smartly and upright, patting down her long and rather childish floral skirt. She has none of Amelia’s sophisticated beauty, with her long fringe and red, knitted cardigan. “I was terribly excited when I heard you would be coming,” she says in a conversational tone. “Of all the orphanages in the area I am so pleased you chose ours for your very first exclusive reading.”

“Well, it’s lovely,” Amelia says warmly. “I’m glad to be here.” She wears a curious expression upon her face, a shadow passing across her eyes, as if looking at a ghost. 

“First we ought to get you settled in the hall, and we’ll bring the children out once the photographers have set up,” Clarissa explains brightly. 

The worry quickly clears from Amelia’s face, and she smiles. “That sounds wonderful.” 

…

Some people, Clarrissa believes, are born to be storytellers. Creators and custodians of language and the images it paints, the emotions it conjures. The entire hall of usually rowdy children are silent in their attentiveness, as if under a spell as Amelia reads. In the story, there are three friends. A young girl is visited by a curious Fae in the forests surrounding an old manor house – at least, the girl in the story believes he is such a creature. Clarissa suspects that the golden, shooting star that the girl spied out of her bedroom window in the opening pages is of some significance. Amelia’s stories often blend the worlds of fairytale and science fiction in a uniquely enchanting manner. Clarissa soaks in every word, ravenous. 

During the reading, a young photographer catches Clarissa’s eye. At times, she almost catches him staring at her, but his gaze flickers away so swiftly when challenged, that she can’t be sure.

He has brown skin and kind eyes, and a red bowtie fastened upon his collar. 

…

When the reading is finished, Amelia and the photographers head outside to take more photos outside the orphanage. Clarissa ushers the children into action, and together with the staff they reorder the dining room for lunch. Clarissa takes the cushioned chair that Amelia was sat upon and goes to return it to the expansive storage cupboard under the staircase. Upon entering the dark space, Clarissa jumps and almost drops the chair at her feet. There is someone standing inside, running a hand across the wall and muttering softly. 

Clarissa clears her throat loudly. “Excuse me?” The figure doesn’t move, its outline shifting darkly in the light of the hallway outside. With a steadying breath, she sets the chair down and tugs on the light switch. Illuminated, the figure turns slowly, and Clarissa recognises him as the man she thought was looking at her during the reading. The photographer with the red bowtie. 

“Why hello there,” he gives her a slight, one-handed wave, smiling brightly. 

“Why are you standing in a cupboard in the dark?” 

“There’s something wrong with your wall,” he mutters, once again pressing his hand up to the surface of the faded plaster, tracing his fingertips over it lightly. “Probably termites or rats or some sort of… something. But it’s lower,” he crouches down on the dusty floorboards, his fingers moving to skirt over them. “Yes, I think so too,” he whispers, pressing his eyes shut. Against her better judgement, Clarissa takes steps into the expansive cupboard. Despite this man’s obvious madness, she is curious. “It’s underneath us. Is there a basement?” He addresses Clarissa.

“Yes, but you aren’t allowed down there. Shouldn’t you be outside? They’re taking more photos.” 

“In a moment, in a moment,” he whispers, leaving Clarissa unsure if he is answering her or his own delusions. Dusting off his trousers, the photographer stands up, coming away from the wall. “You know, I was surprised to see you here,” he says to Clarissa, waggling his finger in the air. “Although, I suppose it makes sense, given my current travelling companion,” he taps the side of his head and winks. 

“Do you know me, sir?” Clarissa says slowly. Uneasy, she steps back towards the hallway.

“Please,” he smiles, holding out his hand. “Call me the Doctor.”

“I thought you were a photographer.” She shakes his hand, and he quickly rescinds his grip, jerking his hand away as if burned. He stares at her beneath thick, furrowed brows. 

“I dabble,” the supposed doctor mumbles. “You are so very strange, aren’t you Clara,” he tilts his head and leans forward, lowering his voice to a whisper. 

“Don’t call me Clara, only my mother calls me that,” she mutters instinctively, before catching the obvious. “How do you know my name?” 

“Because it never changes,” he shrugs. The Doctor circles her, coming to stand between her and the exit. Strangely, Clarissa feels as if she is locked into place. There is something in the Doctor’s eyes, a malevolent glitter that sends a shiver through her, wavering like laughter. “Curiouser and curiouser,” the Doctor murmurs. “You know, I’ve never seen one of you before, not up close. But we’ve all heard the stories – unless you’re the Doctor, of course, because they never listen to stories that aren’t all about them.”

“Aren’t... you the Doctor?” 

“Right, yes,” he shakes his head, smiling to himself. “Yes I am,” and he grips his lapels, puffing out his chest. “I am the Doctor.”

“Look, sir, I really should be getting on. And I think you should be outside taking photos, not lurking about in a store cupboard.”

“No but – but can’t you see it?” he chuckles, low and wild. “Right, of course you can’t, it’s all around you, it’s in you – you are repugnant,” he snarls. His nostrils flare, and his expression contracts; deep-set, blazing eyes. 

“Sir?” she murmurs, edging away from him. 

“A disgusting little creature. Quite frankly illegal, except the people who make the laws are all,” he laughs, low and manic, with glinting teeth, “ _indisposed_. But it’s perfect, so very perfect. Here you are, the Doctor’s monster.” Clarissa’s shoulders tense, cold, and she shudders as the Doctor takes a strand of her hair between his fingers. “And just look at your trajectory,” he tuts, “so predictable. The smattering of your pieces across time, it’s a bell curve. Skewed way to the left, mind, but still, rather beautiful.” He drops her hair and careens back on his heels. “They love the Earth around this time. 19th to 21st century, they’re all over. A plague upon humanity.”

“What are you talking about?” She should be going, she should be running, and yet that glitter in his stare is magnetic. She has heard this laughter somewhere before. 

“Look here, little echo,” the Doctor says, closing in. “I’ve got a little friend here that is quite anxious about your presence. Poor thing,” he sighs, eyes wide and glistening, “lost and alone in this pitiful human age. But this time he’s got the advantage. He’s got me, and I’m not about to let you get in my way,” he pokes a finger into her chest, then spins around and barrels out of the cupboard, pulling the door shut behind him. Clarissa comes back to attention far too late, and by the time she reacts, her palms banging against the rickety wooden door, she hears the lock on the other side click shut. She shouts, banging her fists against the wood until the whole room creaks and seethes in a pall of durst, but as lunch begins, she knows that the children will be far too rowdy to hear her. Fortunately, the cupboard lock is old and flimsy, and she has a few spare hairpins tucked away in her pocket. She would be a poor admirer of fictional heroines if she hadn’t taught herself a few skills to navigate the unexpected. Lockpicking is an essential trick for anyone who hopes to one day find themselves needing to make a daring escape. It also comes in handy when one has been locked in a cupboard by a madman. 

…

Some minutes later, when Clarissa gets herself free, she is flustered. Red-faced, dark hair plastered to her forehead in sweat and dust. She plans to carry out what is surely an ill-advised course of action, but presently she is far too cross to care about sensibility. She is about to have a word with a certain photographer. 

Clarissa storms out of the orphanage and down the front steps towards the crew of photographers set up on the lawn. They are capturing a shot of Mrs Williams and Mr Digbey, side by side in front of the ornate plaque in front of a bed of shrubs and a wall of old, mossy stone. Clarissa scans the crowd; no red bowtie, no madman. 

Presently, Mrs Williams slips away from her position next to the plaque as the photographers continue taking individual shots of the director. Clarissa is still scanning the grounds intensely for the madman when Mrs Williams comes up the front steps. 

“Clarissa, are you alright?” She asks, stopping at the foot of the steps. 

Instinctively, Clarissa reaches up and smooths down her hair. “No ma’a – Amelia,” she answers distractedly. Admittedly, the strange encounter gave her quite the turn. “There was this man earlier, one of the photographers, though now I’m not so sure he is one. He was acting very strangely and he locked me in a cupboard and –”

“Amelia Pond.” Clarissa gasps. Turning around, she sees the photographer and alleged doctor standing behind her in the entrance way. Something is different about his demeanor now. His posture is straighter, his eyes brighter, and altogether he more closely resembles the kind man that Clarissa saw while listening to Amelia's reading, rather than the stooped, manic figure she encountered in the cupboard. There’s a glossy sheen over his black eyes, as if he is holding back tears. 

“How do you know that name?” Amelia says, her voice flat and quiet. 

“Oh, right, the face,” the Doctor grins. “Sorry I didn’t say anything earlier. It was a lovely story, I didn’t want to miss it.” He walks across the threshold and down the steps, stopping upon the final slab of stone. Clarissa darts out of the way to avoid him, walking down onto the gravel path. He doesn’t seem to register her presence, despite their recent encounter. “Sorry it’s taken me so long,” he says. “Couldn’t bring the TARDIS, obviously, but I found a work around. Got the timing a bit off, ended up in Paris 1943 right in the middle of something… not so nice,” he smiles apologetically, and with every word, Amelia’s eyes grow wider, her face paler, her mouth wider in shock. “Took me a while to get over here but… ta daa,” the Doctor beams. There is no trace of the man that just minutes ago had frightened Clarissa so thoroughly. 

“But you’re –” Amelia breathes. 

“Regenerated,” he smiles, pointing at his face. “Happens sometimes. I’ve shown you pictures, I think. Check if you want,” he points lazily at his chest, “two hearts, last of the Time Lords. Kept this old thing.” He adjusts his red bowtie. “What do you think, still cool?

Amelia’s lips quiver up into a teary smile. “Not a chance.” A joyous grin parts her lips, and she throws herself at the Doctor. He jumps down from the step and into her embrace, and the two of them spin on the gravel as they hug one another tight. Clarissa feels that perhaps she shouldn’t be watching this, but the situation is far too strange to ignore. A man that Amelia ignored without a second glance during the reading and was now hugging like a long lost friend. “Raggedy man,” Amelia smiles, pulling away from him. She puts her hands atop his shoulders, looking down at him with a mischievous smirk, “you’re short.” 

“And you’re tall. Never really noticed it before.”

“Wait, but you said one more paradox – “

“Would tear New York apart, yes,” the Doctor dismisses her peculiar remark with a wave. “But I got around it. Always do.” He flashes Amelia a smug grin. “Rules are made to be broken” 

Again, a wide, unrestrained smile blossoms upon her face. She jumps excitedly on the spot, and Clarissa observes the poise and grace of the refined Mrs Williams stripped away to reveal childlike glee. She envelops the Doctor in yet another hug before again pulling back, a quizzical expression on her face. 

“Did you lock her in a cupboard?” she nods askance toward Clarissa. Embarrassed, Clarissa folds her arms and stares off into the grounds, pretending to be oblivious to this strange reunion. 

“Yes, I err, I did sort of do that,” the Doctor mutters. “But, in my defence, I thought she was a Zygon.” He shrugs apologetically. “I may be a little bit paranoid.” The Doctor steps back from Amelia and addresses Clarissa with a bashful smile, wringing his hands in a nervous gesture. “Sorry about that. How did you get out, by the way?” 

Clarissa stares at him for a moment, floored by the man’s transformation. She searches for a hint of malice in his expression, and doesn’t find a trace. “Picked the lock.” 

“Oh you can pick locks, of course you can pick locks,” his voice softens to a rapid whisper. “Would be a bit of a rubbish choice for a companion if you couldn’t.” 

“Excuse me?” Amelia says.

“Ma’am, you know this man?” Clarissa asks, clear and calm. 

“He’s a very, very old friend.” Again, she smiles at the Doctor with a depth of fondness that Clarissa hasn’t ever witnessed before. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

“Would you like me to prove it?” he smiles, smug. His hands flutter up to his bowtie, pulling it straight in what seems an involuntary gesture. “Amelia Pond,” he murmurs, stepping forwards. “Scottish girl in England, and you’ve always thought it a bit rubbish. You love sunflowers and roman mythology and you named your daughter after your daughter, who I then married, but don’t go on about it.” He takes Amelia’s hand and places it on his chest, rising and falling with rapid, excited breaths beneath his dark vest. “Feel it,” he says, soft and hopeful. 

“You’re really back,” she says, voice heavy with tears. 

“Of course I’m back,” he says, pulling her close again, gentler this time. Clarissa finds herself leaning forwards to catch his words. “I always come back. I made you wait again, and I’m so sorry, but you don’t have to wait any more, Amelia Pond. I’m here.” Amelia’s buries her head in his shoulder, and the Doctor turns his head to look at Clarissa, caught staring at the two of them. In that instant, there is not a trace of kindness or warmth on his face. His eyes are cold, his expression flat and vile and terrifying. Something behind them seems to speak to her, to mock, but also to fear. The Doctor winks at her, and Clarissa swiftly turns and heads back inside the orphanage. 

Despite what can only be interpreted as a threat, Clarissa can’t force herself to simply head into the dining hall for lunch and continue on with her usual duties. Amelia is clearly being tricked in some way, and could be in danger. She feels a compulsion – a duty, in fact – to make sure that Amelia is alright. Beyond that, she is curious. So far, these strange events have the making of a potentially dangerous adventure. She has been waiting all her life to find herself within a fantastical story. Either that, or the two friends are completely insane. 

Clarissa ducks out of the entrance hall and into a small office room to the left of the doorway. Inside, the desks are stacked with unprocessed papers. Bills for food and clothing, along with open files containing information on some of the children in their care. She busies herself under the pretence of tidying the files and stowing them away in the cabinet, which isn’t exactly pretence, she reasons, since the job needs doing anyway. It could rightly be considered a coincidence, if she were to overhear a strange conversation in the entrance hall, and follow the speakers to investigate. 

Through the frosted glass window that separates the office from the entrance hall, she watches the blurred figures of Amelia and the Doctor walk past. With the office door open a crack, she hears snatches of their conversation. Their words make even less sense than before. 

“How did you get here if you didn’t use the TARDIS?” Amelia asks.

“Hitched a decidedly one-way trip with an interdimensional being made of pure light. Inconceivable to the eye and extremely hostile – hence the one-way part.” He speaks rapidly, each word spilling over into the next without a breath. 

“So what, now you’re stuck here too? You don’t have the TARDIS.” 

“Well, when you put it like that... Probably stuck, yes. Almost definitely probably stuck.” The pair of them stop at the bottom of the stairs.

“But you’ve got a plan, haven’t you,” Amelia says, pointing at him and smirking in mock-suspicion. “You’ve got your plan face on.”

“It’s a new face.”

She nudges him playfully. “The plan face is the same.”

“What makes you think I have a plan. I’ve never got a plan.”

“Because,” she says, drawing out the word and beginning to pace in front of him, arms folded. “Because you didn’t just rock up at my house one day. You went to the trouble of disguising yourself as a newspaper photographer and coming to this orphanage on the same day I would be here for a book reading. What’s so special about this place? Why come here?”

“Oh ho! You’re good,” the Doctor grins, clicking his fingers and pointing at Amelia. “Rusty on the travelling, but you’ve still got it.” 

“You’d better believe I’ve still got it.”

“Oh, I do.” The Doctor takes Amelia’s hand and looks up at her. “I have a surprise for you,” The woman’s face lights up, and the Doctor opens the door beside the staircase that leads to the basement stairwell. He cries out in a joyful tone; “come along Pond!” and pulls her down into the dark, both of them smiling gleefully. 

Clarissa drops the file she was holding, and, leaving it strewn upon the floor, the filing cabinet still wedged open, she follows the pair. One the way past the door, she spies the photographers winding up their shoot. They’ll be leaving soon enough, wondering why two of their entourage are missing. 

As Clarissa creeps down the stairs to the basement, she hears Amelia’s voice echoing up from the room below. “Okay, your surprise is the basement.” 

“Yes! The basement,” the Doctor replies brightly.

It is a largely empty room, used for storage when the need arises. Smooth grey cement coats every surface, the atmosphere musty and damp. The stacks of unpacked boxes and dust-covered furniture dotted around the space make for convenient hiding places. Clarissa slinks down the final flight of stairs at a crouch, and tucks herself away behind a stack of cardboard boxes, wilting dark in the stagnant air. 

“What’s so special about the basement?” Amelia asks. 

Clarissa pokes her head out from behind the boxes, watching the Doctor and Amelia where they stand surveying a blank grey wall. 

“Well, you see,” – with a skip in his step the Doctor begins to pace in front of the wall, hunched, his hands tracing and flourishing as if over the surface of an invisible ball. All these mannerisms seem to Clarissa to be tacked on – all were missing from their initial meeting. “In about twenty-three years,” the Doctor continues, “an organisation known as the Church of the Silence will open a rift in time in this very wall” – he taps the surface with an open palm and begins to drag his fingertips along it. “The premonitions of the event are all here, beneath the plaster, like aftershocks, except before. Before shocks,” his voice softens to a whisper. “A backwards earthquake, rippling through time like… like an echo.” The Doctor turns back to Amelia, rubbing his hands together.

Although Clarissa can’t see her face, Amelia’s sad smile is plain in every word. “I’ve really, really missed you.”

The Doctor smiles in return. “I’ve missed you too.” He turns back to the wall, hands splayed and outstretched. “But, the energy’s all here, dormant, untapped. And it all comes back to Melody – Melody was full of artron energy, _infused_ with the energies of the time vortex. They will use that energy to open a rift right here, right in this very room, in twenty-three years.” The Doctor turns back to Amelia, one eyebrow raised conspiratorially. “So what if we could harness it?”

“Okay, what if we could harness it?” 

“Well, we probably can’t, but if we were to try, we would need some sort of link to the energy signature that created – or will create – the rift in time.” Clarissa thinks that this must be some sort of creative process. Thinking up new ideas for stories by immersing oneself in make-believe. Usually Clarissa gets by well enough pretending inside her head, but she isn’t a professional storyteller. It has to be pretend, because the alternative is that both of these people are entirely insane. 

“What sort of link?” Amelia asks. 

“The strongest sort there is.” The Doctor faces Amelia, taking her hand in both of his own, turning up her palm and tracing his thumb over the surface. “Blood,” he says importantly. “We would, hypothetically of course, need a biological link, the original source of the energy now echoing through this very sliver of space and time.”

“Like a mother,” Amelia murmurs. 

“Exactly,” he taps a finger gently on her nose and spins back to face the wall. “If by some miracle it were to work, we could pull the energy backwards through time to this moment, anchoring it to you. Out there in the vortex, moving through time is as simple as moving through space. Just a little tug. Displace the energy, and use it to create a rift here instead.”

“To where?”

“Anywhere, really. It would be a gamble.” It’s a wonderful concept for a story. Just a concept, Clarissa reminds herself. It has to be. Pretend or insanity, she doubts her ability to get back up those stairs without being noticed. “No way of knowing where you’d end up, and with all the infinity that’s out there, chances are it’d be the cold and unforgiving vacuum of space – but, and this is the good part – I’m here. I’m here, and I’m extremely clever.”

“Yes, and I’m starting to remember how annoying you are.” Amelia puts a hand roughly upon his shoulder. 

“Touch the wall, Amelia.” The Doctor takes her hand from his shoulder and guides it over to the plaster, pressing her palm gently to the surface. “Right here, do you feel anything?”

“Well it’s sort of damp,” she grimaces. 

“Now concentrate, concentrate very hard on your daughter. You are linked, by more than blood – they did things to you. Horrible things, and I will never be able to express how sorry I am for that, but just this once they might come in useful.” His voice is soft, gentle. He guides Amelia’s hand along the wall. “You are bonded, through time, by the deadly, impossible energy of the time vortex. Use it now. _Feel_ it now. Call to her, Amelia.” 

Above, the dull, exposed bulb flickers minutely, and a spark of white light begins to glow between Amelia’s fingertips where they are pressed against the wall. A fizzle and a crack, as a split in the plaster spreads outwards in an instant, striking a jagged line across its surface. The sound of it is like frost crunching underfoot, the whistle of a bitter breeze. Beyond the crack, the light folds and sings. 

Amelia gasps and jerks her hand backwards. Immediately the light begins to fade, its song silenced. The crack remains, a stubborn black line. 

“Excellent,” the Doctor hisses. 

“It’s like the crack – the crack in my wall,” Amelia murmurs in a wandering, delirious tone. 

“Sort of,” the Doctor explains, putting an arm around Amelia in comfort. “Same basic concept – although, funny story, turns out all that was just the extended family trying to get me to tell them the wifi password, sort of.” He shakes his head, tightening his grip around Amelia. “But, but you felt it, it responded to you. That’s promising. I could, very, very potentially, direct the energy to, say, precisely eight years after you left. How about we round it off, welcome in a new decade. What do you say, Amelia Pond, about New Year’s Day 2020? Don’t know if I’ll get it bang on, but it’s good to have a target in mind,” he claps Amelia on the back and pulls away, going back to examining the wall. Deft fingers press against the fissure, Clarissa’s eyes are glued to the black line as the Doctor traces its path. The snow-white afterglow shimmer, and a sound prickles in her ears like radio static. “Excellent,” the Doctor repeats, quieter. 

“But, but wait.” Amelia says, rounding on the Doctor. “I have a life here. Rory and I, we have a life.”

“Yes, in 1946. You know enough about history to know it’s not all sunshine and roses from here on out. What about your friends, your family?” He faces her, stepping closer. “Your parents and your aunts, Amelia, in old Leadworth town.”

Amelia presses her lips together and nods. “No, I know. You’re right. I do want to go back. I really do.”

“Yes,” the Doctor claps, “back to daytime soap operas and Twitter and a noticeable decline, though abject persistence of misogyny.” Clarissa leans out a little further, transfixed by the crack in the wall. Though it is whisper-quiet, she is almost certain it is still singing. Beyond that, there is something hungry in the air. A distinctive taste, beyond the usual scent of faint mould, damp stone, and rotting furniture. It’s like engine smoke, and singed toast – like flesh burning. She’s starting to believe that this might be a very real adventure, ripped straight from the page. The marriage of magic and science ever present in Mrs Willaims’ genius stories. 

“But is this actually going to work?” Amelia asks the Doctor. “You said this was fixed time, that we could never go back.”

The Doctor smirks. “Maybe you missed the part about being really, very clever.”

The smell is growing stronger; a prickle in her throat, her mind. A voice, maybe, or perhaps a laugh. Clarissa edges forwards on her hands and knees, trying to get a better view of the wall, and get closer to the source of the voice; mocking, _laughing_. 

_Child, child, child._

Clarissa’s hand slips, and her elbow juts out, nudging a chair leg. Her arm hits the old wood with a crack that cuts sharp through the musty quiet of the room. Clarissa stifles a gasp with her other hand, but she senses the quick movements of the pair by the wall, heads whipped around to the source of the noise. 

“What was that?” Amelia says, guarded and uneasy.

“Could be just a sort of… random creak,” the Doctor gazes up at the ceiling. “Old place.”

“It’s never just a random creak.” 

“Ah, shhhh,” she Doctor winces, pressing his fingers to the side of his head.

“What, what is it?” Amelia asks, darting to his side.

“Oh you know, voices in my head.” The Doctor shrugs, clasping his lapels as if to steady himself. “Same old Doctor. Nevermind me. Go, call Rory. Tell Rory the Roman that his wait is over!” he cries, flinging his arms up. “Back to the world of modern medicine!” 

Amelia beams at the Doctor, and Clarissa, from her position pressed flat against the stone floor with one hand over her mouth, catches the glint of her eyes through a gap in the stacks of jumbled effects. She’s never seen such delight. Amelia darts up the stairs with quick, energetic steps. 

Once the creak of the stairwell door sounds, and the room is enclosed in dank, dim silence, the kindness slides from the Doctor’s face. It drops to the cement like a discarded mask, and in its place is a dark, flat stare. A sordid smile. 

“Alright then dear,” he says in a soft, coaxing tone, “come on out.”

Clarissa feels her chest tighten, panic shooting a paralysing chill through every nerve. 

“I know you’re here, little miss Clara,” he sings, low, foreboding. “You shouldn’t eavesdrop. It’s _extremely_ rude,” he grimaces. For a moment, he stops, eyebrows raised, and head tilted, listening. In a sudden flurry of movement, his face twists into an expression of rage, and he kicks over a stool nearby. It clatters to the stone with a deafening thud. Clarissa feels the impact through the floor. “Come on!” he screams. “I am not going to let you ruin this! Come out!” He swipes out at a cardboard box sitting precariously on top of a pile, letting the clattering contents clang to the floor. Clarissa winces, and slowly drags herself to her feet, shaking. The stench of burning flesh lingers, overpowering. 

Clarissa puts her hands up, palms out in surrender. The Doctor’s expression softens, and he smiles thinly. “There we are. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” 

“Who are you?” Clarissa asks, slowly making her way out through the stacks of boxes and furniture heaped at the back of the room. 

“Never you mind.”

“What did Mrs Williams do to the wall?” Again, Clarissa feels her eyes drawn to it. Heat in her chest, crimson to brown. Its song is louder now, and so is the laughter in her head. 

The Doctor pinches the bridge of his nose, frowning in irritation. “I am trying to get around a grievous little snag, highly inconvenient, wherein I am forced to wait out the next seventy-four years to tie off a pretty blonde loose end. None of your business, truth be told, so run along!” his arm snaps out, pointing sharp and commanding at the exit. 

Clarissa scowls at him. “If you’re up to something dangerous – “

The Doctor lets out a strangled groan, petering to a growl low in his throat. “This is just so _typical,"_ he spits. “I’m the reason you’re here in the first place, and now here you are trying to ruin everything. And you,” he grabs her by the wrist, her hands still raised in surrender. “Why are you here, it makes no sense.” Clarissa tugs her wrist free and shrinks back. The Doctor sighs, putting a hand to his brow in frustration. “He isn’t here, so why are you? It was his time stream, you shouldn’t even be here. I should kill you now, except it tells me that’s not possible.”

Clarissa shakes her head in disbelief. “You’re completely mad.”

“Of course I’m mad,” he grins, far too wide. His face looks as if it’s about to split. “A curious little side effect,” he says, voice biting, silky, far too close. His breath is cold. “You simply aren’t meant to die. You wouldn’t die, under ordinary, unaltered circumstances, except I’m not meant to be here at all. No more ordinary circumstances.” He chuckles, adjusting his bowtie. “But no matter what I do to you in this moment, you will always come away unscathed. It’s like, it’s like an itch. Time senses going off, big, red, blaring alarms. I can’t touch you, because it’s wrong, it’s against the rules. You’ve bent them around yourself in a shield, a cocoon,” he smiles, all teeth. “How do you manage that?” 

Clarissa takes a step back, and the Doctor takes one forward. He takes something out of his pocket. A compact device of rusted copper and silver, a glowing yellow light affixed to one side. “I must admit, this little thing has gotten quite the workout over the past three years, and I wonder, will it endeavour to fail, for no discernable reason, on today of all days?” In a jerking movement, he holds the device out at her and tugs at a clunky metal trigger. Nothing happens. He tries again, and out rings a dull click, like a jammed pistol. “There, told you,” he mutters, eyebrows raised. “Not a thing wrong with it, I maintain it with great care, but it won’t let me kill you – yes, yes, _alright_ ,” he puts his other hand to the side of his head, wincing. “Hang in there a mo,” he tells Clarissa. 

This might be the perfect opportunity to escape, but her legs feel heavy as stumps, rooted to the earth. Her eyes wander over to the crack in the wall. “Orders are in,” the Doctor says, opening his eyes again. Clarissa’s attention returns, but the singing goes on. It’s the only word she can find to describe the warbling, undulating noise, its sinusoidal pattern of contraction, expansion, inversion. “You see, I like company. I spent a lot of time alone in a big, empty room, in a head devoid of all that familiar, _pounding_ noise,” his smile falters, quivers. “I’ve got a friend in here, and he was very lucky to find me. Down he came, like a fallen angel, along with the bombs carving craters into the Parisian skyline. I am a gracious host, Miss Clara, and though I might be unable to kill you, as my kindly guest informs me – says he has plenty of past experience, a great many experimental trials – I’ve got a different approach in mind.” 

Clarissa, enraptured by his strange talk, pieces of a story slotting in, doesn’t have time to react when the Doctor’s arm surges forwards in a sudden burst of intent motion. He grabs her shoulder, holding her in place with a vice-like grip, while his other arm shoots towards her head. When his fingers reach her skin, the flesh at her temple, a cold sting swells within her skull, pressing against bone. She staggers beneath the weight. 

A hand grips like iron against her shoulder, and another presses ice against her head. A stupor takes hold; limbs submerged in treacle, each step dragging over harsh cement. Blurred, black outlines of furniture bobbing into view, passing. Behind her, a white eye watches from a crack in the wall. These are background sensations. At the forefront, someone is taunting her. A deep voice, like blue electricity through fibre-optic cables, or a green glow deep beneath a haunted forest. It greets her like an old friend. 

It explains, in the voice of a hardened storyteller, as plainly as ink on a page, the nature of this adventure she has fallen into. This city is a wound, and it bleeds temporal energy. Paradoxes merging, a melody amplified through constructive interference, once fed upon by angels made of stone. The angels are dead now, but the scar tissue remains, white and raw. At the smallest prick, the wound will reopen. The sky will crack and time will crumble. The chaos will feed the creature for eons, and the sliver of white in the wall will give it an opening through which to slide, to slink behind the walls of the universe itself. Soon enough the house will wilt, collapsing into a ruin of rotten wood and black, putrid mould. It describes these images with such clarity, such poetry, that Clarissa (though in the din she forgets her particular variation of the name, a substitute in the recipe) thinks it beautiful. 

The creature tells her that her pain is soon to end. She thinks that would be rather nice. Amicable, in this state. Suggestable. The iron grip suggests she run along, and sit idle in the darkened corner of the basement. She obeys her master. 

Clarity comes slow, and she claws for every sliver of it. The iron grip begins to slacken, the ice to melt, piece by piece. The dim light of the basement’s singular bulb does not reach her here, and the watery dark shapes surrounding partly obscure her view of the room. 

The man with the iron grip stands beneath a spotlight, and strokes the crack in the wall He glares into its eye, and waits. Soon a woman joins him. Amelia, Clarissa recalls, fights. 

“Rory on his way?” the Doctor asks. But no, Clarissa realises, vague but sure. That isn’t his name. He is the Master – and not only hers, she realises, but in a general sense. It is his title, his promise. His role in the story. 

“Rory on his way!” Amelia echoes, giving the Master a thumbs up. 

“Team Pond, together again!” the Master claps, spinning on his heels. “Now, the energy behind that crack has been brewing away nicely, it’s waiting for you. Pond, work your magic! Now,” he lowers his voice, putting a hand to his chin and rubbing his beard in thought. “You stand right here,” he taps his foot against the cement just in front of the crack. Amelia obeys.

“Should we wait for Rory?”

“Trust me, getting this right is going to take a while. May as well get started now. We’ve got a great deal of energy to pull back through time and it’s no easy feat,” he puts his hands on Amelia’s shoulders, having to reach up considerably. “You could at least crouch, eh. Make me feel a little better.” 

Amelia laughs. “You wish. I’m going to be wearing stilettos every time you come round, raggedy man.”

“Yeah well, of course you are,” he murmurs fondly. “Of course you are, Amelia Pond.” A touch of sadness in his tone. Clarissa hears it ring from her place in the corner, hidden away. It’s false, every scrap of it. Can’t Amelia feel its pointed edge? 

Amelia reaches tentatively out towards the crack, once more placing her hand against it. When she does, Clarrisa’s head twinges. The voice is laughing, the iron grip shaking with anticipation. Behind Amelia, the Master’s bumbling facade drops for a moment and he stands still, stooped, staring with a sinister glint. The crack begins to widen, whiteness creeping in jagged patterns up and down the wall. 

Amelia gasps. “Can you feel the ground shaking? It’s like it’s breaking apart.” Clarissa can feel it too, though she can see that the ground remains steady. Sensation contradicting reality. She feels dizzy, and the stench is worse than ever – like boiling blood, old moss on stone. “Doctor, something’s wrong,” Amelia says, voice urgent. “It’s hot it’s like, like the air is burning, and the ground’s splitting.”

“That’s how it’s meant to feel, don’t stop!” he cries. “Concentrate, Amelia. I know you can do this.”

The stone of the wall begins to ripple and melt away beneath a sheet of white heat. Clarissa stares into the yawning space and lets the light spot her eyes. Across the blinding white sky, a leaf drifts; swift in dead air. A deep sensation, sun on her skin, or a columnic inferno. Sureness, of who she is and where she’s going. 

Amelia cries out in pain, and she jerks her arm away from the light. 

“Yes, yes!” the Master shouts. “Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Thanks a bunch, Pond.” He takes a jaunted step towards the light, wide-eyed. The Master reaches out, his fingertips entering the swirling mass. “Ohh, yowza!” he cries, tensing up. Half wonderment, half pain. “That’s it,” he shudders, dragging his hand through the light. “Just direct it a little,” he winces, doubling over where he stands, “yes, _yes_ I’m getting there,” he hisses. Clarissa hears the cold voice of the creature, growing impatient. 

“Doctor, what’s happening?” Amelia asks, looking at the ceiling. The stone ripples in peals of vibrant colour, phasing in and out of vision, a side-effect of the impossible. The light screams. The Master doesn’t answer, continuing to mutter to himself, muscles shaking as his palm traces a path through the whiteness. “Doctor, you said one more paradox –”

“There!” he exhales, yanking his hand back. “Essex, 2020.”

“It feels like this whole place is going to come down.” 

“Then let’s go!” he says, hooking his arm around her’s. “Back to the future, how about that – _yes_ , alright,” he hisses. The creature groans. “You’re too impatient, that’s _enough._ ” 

“Who are you talking to?”

“My secret conscience,” he shrugs, tugging on his bowtie. “Bit of a buzzkill. Now let’s go – into the looking glass, eh Amelia?”

“We’re waiting for Rory,” she reminds him, casting another uneasy glance at the kaleidoscopic air. Can the children above them feel the world ending? 

“Oh, right. Waiting for Rory, always waiting for Rory,” the Master grumbles, petulant.

“What do you mean?” For the first time since the stranger’s arrival, Amelia looks afraid. Small, despite her elegance. Childlike. Colours swirl nebulous in her eyes. 

“I mean we don’t have time Amelia! Now is your chance, here is your window. Take it!” he grips her hands tightly. Manic rage mingles with his fumbling mannerisms, and the effect is jarring. “It’s now or never,” he snarls at her. “Geronimo.” 

“What are you talking about?” her voice chokes on the way out. 

“I mean, I mean,” he pulls her hands closer, holding them in both of his own. “I mean, I came here for you. Last time we waited for Rory, look what happened. Look where it got us. Always, _always_ Rory,” he growls.

“Doctor what’re you –”

“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“But you said –”

“I lied, Amelia, I lied. Has it been so long that you don’t even remember rule one,” he spits, face pulled close to her’s, jutting chin tilted up.

“You’re scaring me, stop it,” she twists her hands out of his grip. Stepping back, she takes a deep, staggering breath, and speaks levelly. “One more paradox…”

“Will tear New York apart, yes. But we’ll be long gone.”

“But it’ll destroy the city, probably the entire planet! I’m not leaving here without Rory! Besides, time won’t… I don’t know, it won’t work, it won’t –”

“Time won’t what? I’m a Time _Lord,_ Amelia,” he roars. “Time does whatever I say it does, and it’s time you and I were going. One more trip, just us against the universe. It’s waiting for us, beyond this planet – Earth, you never did like it, always wanted to escape. Even now, writing stories. Don’t you want to make them come true?” His chest heaves as he offers her an open palm. “Take my hand, Amelia Pond, and run away with me.” 

“What happened to you?” Amelia sobs, edging backwards. “Who are you!” she shouts, face red. He follows, taking her hand once more. Gentler now, the bite gone from his expression. The whiteness of the rift blazes behind them, and while the Earth stirs, the creature shouts a beckoning cry. _Hurry, hurry!_

“Same old Doctor, I’m afraid,” he says, soft and menacing. “After everything I’ve sacrificed for you.” He snarls and turns away. The Master straightens his bowtie, and walks towards the light. Before he passes into the glow, he turns, face twisted into an expression of pure anger. “I won’t be back, Amelia. Not five minutes, not twelve years, not for the rest of your shrivelled, pitiful mortal life!” A smirk tugs at his lips, his voice lowered to a cold whisper. “You will be waiting for the rest of your days.”

As the Master leans forwards, tendrils of white spring forth, slow and snake-like, enveloping his body. Beneath his skin, his veins run phosphorescent. The creature is elated. Finally, a plan comes to fruition, slinking between the walls, growing, feeding on the well of energy left behind by dead creatures of shadow with snarling stone faces. The Master begins to scream. 

Amelia pales, tears streaming down her cheeks. She backs away, unsteady, as the room begins to shake.

“Finally, Back to where we started.” the Master mutters, voice overlaid with a pitchy-buzz, a rib-deep drone. “No – no, what are you doing!” Clarissa watches as the Master tries to push himself further into the light. “Stop it! No, take me with you!” But the glow begins to fade, the tendrils of white receding, slinking back into their well, rejoining reality’s scarred flesh. The Master falls back from the wall, launched as if pushed by an invisible hand. He hits the cement with a thud, knocking over a pile of cardboard boxes that crash onto the floor, metal trinkets knocking together, ceramic smashing. The sound is nothing to the voltaic crack that rends the dank cellar, a surging volley of thunder, the peak of the light’s whining scream, its melody long since lost. The un-quaking earth continues to spin, to shake, the bulb on the ceiling has shattered, but the light of the rift far surmounts its once feeble glow. The rift remains wedged open, and New York – no, the entire planet, the timestream of its existence – is being cannibalised by the creature. Torn apart, just as Amelia warned.

The Master struggles to his feet from amongst the scattered artifacts, rubbing his head. “No, no,” he mutters, the sound building in his throat. “No, no no!” he shouts. He jumps to his feet and runs to the wall of light, bringing his fist down against the surface, making a sound like a crackling flame. The Master cries out in pain, clutching his singed hand. “You bastard!” he screams. “You incorporeal, self-obsessed, Lovecraftian bastard!” 

From her position dazed and braced against the back of a mouldy sofa, Amelia crosses the room towards the Master with an expression of grim determination on her face, cheeks flushed with anger. 

“What the hell was that!” she pushes his chest hard, and the Master stumbles backwards. She slaps him across the face, palm flattened to a sheet of steel. The sound cracks across his cheek and he stumbles back once more. Wide-eyed, he reaches up to delicately touch his cheek, a grin splitting his face. “You’re not the Doctor,” Amelia growls. “You – you can’t be. So who are you?” 

“Well of course I’m not the Doctor you stupid girl!” he shouts. “What sort of friend are you? Can’t even recognise an imposter.” The Master straightens up and flattens his collar. He stares forlorn at the wall of light, stepping towards it. “This always happens,” he sighs, draping a languid, theatrically-poised hand upon his brow. “I’m a magnet for petty betrayal. You know, you’d think that after all this time I’d be used to it but this,” he winces, jerking his head and holding up one waggling, accusing finger. “This one hurts.” He nods, gazing up at the ceiling with a self-pitying expression. “You know, I liked him, I really did. I thought we had something special.”

“Stop it, just stop talking. Right now.”

“So angry,” the Master says, rolling his eyes. “Proper Scottish. I was Scottish last time and I tell you, phew,” he whistles, “I can relate. Razed my favourite planet to the ground.” He sighs fondly. Amelia stands before him, expression wrought with confusion. 

“But you’re a Time Lord, you’re like him,” Amelia says. “All the other Time Lords are dead.”

“Well they are now,” he chuckles. The low sound grows into a maniacal laugh. It mingles with the sound of the walls splitting apart.

“Shut up!” 

The Master stops abruptly, eyes blown wide, he throws her a weird smirk and claps his hands together. “Well, that’s it, reality’s over. Don’t get me wrong, I have a death wish, I have a death wish like you wouldn’t believe,” he forces a chuckle, wiping an imaginary tear from his eye, “but I had a whole plan. A whole beautiful plan with Time Lord Cybermen and mutually assured destruction,” he shrugs, gazing fondly into the middle distance. “Would have been marvellous.” He steps towards Amelia, offering a handshake. “I’m the Master. The Doctor probably mentioned me,” he scratches the back of his neck, smiling bashfully, “once or twice.” 

“Nope.” Amelia says, resolute. 

“Oh that,” he huffs, nose twitching. “Othering Dalek.” 

“How do you know everything about me?”

“Because I did my research!” 

The iron grip on Clarissa’s shoulder begins to slip. 

Amelia casts around the room, panic alight in her eyes. “I’m getting out of here.” Her gaze settles upon Clarissa in the back corner, now illuminated by the nebulous eddies of colour warping space and time. “Wait,” she says, dashing over to the corner. “Clarissa?” she cries, kneeling down to try and help Clarissa to her feet. 

“What,” the Master mutters. “Oh right!” he smacks himself on the forehead. “Little Miss Clara,” he snaps his fingers and relinquishes his grip, the ice-cream pain in Clarissa’s head melting to a sticky puddle. 

With Amelia's arms around her, heaving her upright, Clarissa gasps. Feeling snakes through her nerves, sparks through her mind. Her thoughts run too quickly to catch, and upon a grassy hill she’s never visited she chases them, leaves on the wind. 

“Bring her over here, Pond,” the Master drawls.

“No way,” Amelia snarls. She turns to Clarissa with a kind smile. “Get back upstairs, get everyone out of here. Get them as far away as you can.” Clarissa nods raptly. With mobility and will restored, her breathing comes quick and hot. 

“Running won’t make a difference. Do you want to stop the world from ending or not?”

“You’ve done enough damage!” Amelia shouts. Even the sound of their voices are warping now, joining the song. She feels the air pulling at her skin, contorting her muscles, twisting her bones as if they were rubber. The world is a kaleidoscope of jagged shapes and slides of colour; glass and cellophane, the colour of flames. The colour of autumn. 

“Go on then Clara,” the Master chides, and with a pinch his cold grip returns. “You know you want to.” 

“Clarissa, we need to run!” Amelia tugs at her hand, but her grip falls through, substanceless. Ghosts adrift. “Look,” she rounds on the Master. “You’re going to fix this, you’re going to fix it right now!” 

The Master steps towards Clarissa. Backwards, forwards – it’s all becoming muddled. 

“My friend is waiting for you, beyond the wall – can’t you hear him singing?” whispers the Master. “Because you’re the balance, the counterweight, tipping the scale back to cosmic equilibrium. Every victory undone you do right back up again with a pretty little bow – go, Clara.” The grip twists, but she welcomes it. 

“Get away from her!” Amelia yells. 

This is the part of the story where the heroine sacrifices herself to save the day. She’s done it a thousand times before. 

This is the part of the story where the serpent eats its tail. 

A murmur in her ear; “I think it’s time that, for once, I was the double-crosser.” 

From far away, there is a creak, bounding footsteps, a stifled gasp. “Woah, ok. Weird lights and earthquakes going on up there. What’s happening? I feel like I might have missed –” 

“Rory!’ Amelia cries, and Clarissa feels her presence sift away. 

“You can feel it, can’t you?” the Master says. “Wouldn’t it be a lark to get you under the temporal microscope, _this,”_ he hisses, “this is revolting – you’re a part of…” he trails off. “Destiny’s waiting, love. All lined up, must be nice.” Nails digging in, painful. “Now get a shift on.” 

Beyond the wall, the creature sighs, resigned. The stench is overpowering, and Clarissa realises that it was her own flesh that was burning, is burning. Will burn. 

“Clarissa!” someone cries.

“W-wait, so is the Doctor here or…” a man stammers. 

Clarissa walks into the light 

Before she does, she turns back and whispers to the breaking world. The children above must be so frightened, fearing the nuclear apocalypse that haunts their nightmares. “Run,” she says. 

In the mirrored chaos, the Master rolls his eyes. She feels his hand upon her back. 

“Yes, love,” he hisses into her ear. “I know the rest,” and with a push, she falls into the void. 

In the infinite instant before she is torn apart by oblivion, the creature greets her with a snarl. 

_And here we are again, child. I am beginning to realise the fruitlessness of this endeavor. You are growing, don’t you see?_

She can’t see anything.

_I’ll make sure to tell you when we meet again._

The story ends. Here, in the schism, something golden glitters. 

**Bristol, 2014**

Late afternoon by the Bristol railway line, two-dimensional monsters defeated. If she were still the Doctor, this would be the point in the adventure when she might ask Rigsey if he fancied a trip in the box. As it happens, her privileges have been revoked. 

“So, fancy giving me a lift back to London?” she asks the Doctor, as she follows him into the TARDIS, its exterior dimensions now restored. 

“I thought you missed lunch.” That she did, and Danny definitely saw through her abysmal excuse that – for the record – wasn’t actually a lie. For once. 

“Yeah, doesn’t mean I want to catch a train. I’ve had enough subway tunnels for one day, maybe forever.” She chuckles, but stops short at the look on the Doctor’s face; stern, transparent, surveying. Attack eyebrows. She really doesn’t fancy another lecture. 

“What are you going to tell Danny?” He asks. It’s quite obvious, though he wants her to admit it. She’s going to lie. She’s been lying everyday, lies piling on top of other lies, and now the whole dark, precarious, misshapen stack is toppling, and it’s all she can do to stop herself from being buried beneath it. Danny knows, and she knows he knows, and he probably knows that too. They’re locked in a stalemate, each waiting for the other to cave. 

“That’s my business.” Clara replies shortly. It’s for his own benefit as well, she thinks. If Danny confronts her, then they’ll have to talk about it, then the betrayal is real. He did warn her, months ago, that if she lied to him, it would be over. It’s like she’s challenging him. How big does the lie have to get before he keeps his promise? Just another big talker; she doesn’t think he’ll ever fulfil his ultimatum. He needs her as much as she needs him. It does make her wonder – is it love, or a mutually agreed-upon codependency. 

Is there a difference?

“Look, I may not be a relationship expert, but you should probably tell PE about what you’re doing. Have a proper sit-down discussion – from my understanding that’s mainly what relationships are about.” He steeples his fingers, peering over them at her, teacherly. “You can’t keep lying.”

Clara nods, training her eyes on the TARDIS controls. “You’re right,” she says, addressing her fingers. “You’re not a relationship expert.”

“Clara –”

“Just leave it to me, okay? I know what I’m doing, and don’t pretend you know any better just because you lived among otters or whatever. It doesn’t mean you know what’s best for me.” The words spill fast, brunted. 

He is infuriatingly calm. Eyes wide and sincere. It’s a new look for his new face. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Right,” she says dismissively. Clara turns to go, taking her bag with her to her bedroom. Maybe a few more trips will put her in the right headspace to return home to Danny. Help her think up a few decent excuses that he might half-believe. He caught her packing a toothbrush in her handbag one morning, this was after he’d already discovered she had gone out and purchased a much larger handbag than she normally used so she could covertly pack more with her on an apparent day trip. It might have turned into a confrontation, but he backed away from it, took in her pitiable excuses amicably enough, and pretended to be satisfied. “You know,” Clara rounds on the Doctor. “If we’ve established anything today it’s that I can take care of myself.” 

A half-smile, a knowing smile. The Doctor hangs his head and starts punching in coordinates. 

“You taking me home?” 

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“Yeah, well, I suppose. Don’t need to be back until Monday morning for school. Could squeeze in a couple more trips. Still need to grab some lunch. You could take me for space lunch or… something.” 

He turns, back against the console, lips pressed together as if disguising a laugh. “Clara you’re quite certain that this is what you want?” 

“Fine. Drop me home, whatever. I’ll do some marking.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Then what are you asking?” she huffs, folding her arms. Defensive already. It’s her new permanent state of mind. 

“Are you angry about something?”

“No, no, I’m not.” He raises an eyebrow in disbelief. “I’m not,” she insists, angrily. He turns back to the console, hands raised in surrender. 

“I’ll take you to a place with the most excellent Karahi. In space, obviously – fifty-second century, an interesting branch of the pseudo-human empire. The Crestellian Galaxy Belt, home to thirty-six inhabited star systems, one of which I think I might still technically be the emperor of, so best steer clear of any locals that might recognise the face form the coin –”

“Doctor?” she interrupts. 

“Hmm?”

“What were you asking?” She keeps her voice level, gentle. The anger is at herself, not him, she’s just not so good at keeping it trained in the right direction. 

“A few weeks ago you wanted to give this up.”

“Yeah, and I changed my mind. On a whim, I do that – you said so yourself.” It was one of the first things he learned about her. _Come back tomorrow, and I might change my mind._ “And it’s been more like a few months, just so you know.” 

“Right. Time and all your silly words for it,” he says stiffly. Keeping up an act. 

“I was angry because it made things easy. It made things over, but I don’t want them to be over.” 

“And Danny?” he asks, eyebrows raised. His jealousy is opaque. Bright, bold, envy-green. 

“It’s not his decision.” Danny says he just wants her safe, but sometimes she isn’t sure. Controlling, a bit possessive. Jealous. She feels like a protagonist in a young adult novel. 

“And what if you have to choose?” the Doctor asks. If all goes to plan, she never will. She’s quite good at avoiding things, like family dos and PTA meetings. She prefers his kind of impossible choice, the addictive ones, the ones that save worlds and end lives. This choice is just as impossible, and just as unfair. 

Abruptly, she changes the subject. “Do you really think you’re not good?” 

He plays along, fiddling with the controls in their blocky panels, yellow squares and red circles. “Well, you did say you weren’t sure,” the Doctor reasons. He told her that she was exceptional, but not good. Good was too pure and high a benchmark to reach, for people such as them. Three out of six kept alive. Fifty percent is satisfactory, she thinks. A passing mark. 

“I said you’re trying, and I – it felt good. Winning, saving them, saving the world. It all balances out in the end, right?” She tries not to sound too desperate. It must balance out, else the Doctor wouldn’t have kept at it for so long. It has to be worth the lies, the people you can’t save. 

“Clara, I’ve been having that conversation with myself for over two thousand years,” he smiles at her, bemused and genial. 

“Right,” once again she turns to leave. She needs to get changed, scrub the dirt and spray paint smell out of her hair. “Let me know if you figure out the answer.” 

“Yes,” he hisses softly, spinning back to face the console, stilted and dark. “And let me know if you make your choice.”

**London, 2014**

The clock above the dining table ticks, each strike deafening, obnoxious, mocking. She’s been sitting here for four hours. Her muscles are sore, so tight she feels they might snap if she shifts her weight, and her legs are submerged in a stinging buzz of pins and needles. Her phone is open, little green bubbles running up the screen, never answered. She is texting Danny Pink, and he never answers. 

She wonders what happens to your phone number when you die. Do they give it to someone else, or will there always be a ghost waiting at the end of the line? If there is a ghost waiting, it doesn’t speak to her. She calls it nearly everyday. 

She calls the Doctor too, but he is just as evasive. A ghost, just as dead as Danny. 

Her stomach hurts; knotted up and gnawing at itself. There’s a half-empty mug of coffee in front of her, long-since gone cold. Black rings staining white ceramic, liquid fermenting tar-like in the chill. The sky outside the kitchen window is grey. Day grey. The arrogant clock reads half past four. 

Time won’t stop for her, and she’s asked it nicely too. It keeps on going, relentless, without a backwards glance, and with every passing moment he gets colder. They’ve put him in a fridge somewhere. She knows because she had to go and make sure it was him. 

Such a small little thing; a red lump on his head, bruise rising around it in a grotesque bloom. The colours were almost pretty, against the darkening grey of the rest of him. His skin used to be warm and brown, and it was sapped from him, day grey, speckled with indents made by the particles of tarmac that rose to meet him before it all went dark. He fought in battles, proper battles with guns and explosions, and he died because he hit his head at just the right angle, with just enough force. Fragile little human beings. She often wonders about how it felt; dying. Was her voice the last thing he heard? She should be happy about that, probably, except that he never did say it back, not properly. Just the sign-off, the pat on the back, the voluntary slip, but she really meant it. For the first time in her life, and the last time, she really meant it. Three little words, killing words; _I love you._

Maybe he would have looked properly at the crossing if she had held her tongue for just a moment. It only happened a few hundred metres down the road, a few minutes and he would have been home, but she was too scared. Always rushing into things; so bold, so _entitled_. Bossy Miss Oswald – except she isn’t anymore. She hasn't been back to Cole Hill School since the accident. She wonders if they ever scrubbed out the graffiti the kids tagged all over the bathroom stalls. Ozzy loves the squaddie. They used to sing it at her in their horrid, teasing tones. She misses them. 

Her thoughts swing between two modes; these racing, endless circles, exhausting, and a slump. A dark pit into which her thoughts slide, drip over, and stay sloshing about in the mud until the clocks ticks all the way around and the sky is day grey again. 

People keep phoning her, like her Dad and her Gran and her old colleagues. She’s very good at sounding chirpy on the line, putting on a high, cheery voice, dead eyes above a grin. She tells them how sad she is, and they tell her how sorry they are to hear it. So very sorry for her loss, as if she is the one that’s lost. They were only together for a year, not so long at all. They weren’t married, nothing so bureaucratic, but it still feels as if her life has been ripped out from under her. She feels like she’s falling. 

She tells them all that she needs time, and they say that they understand – _take as much as you need_. They remind her that they will always be here, but it’s a lie. No one will always be here. She doesn’t need time, she needs it to stop. Better yet, to wind backwards. She knows time, far better than most. She knows just how flexible it can be.

Her apartment has become a florist’s. Flowers stacked upon the kitchen counters and the dining table. Some of them didn’t make it past the mat by the front door. They suffocate her. Thick, sweet scented, all dove white and soft _pink_. I guess they thought they were being clever. 

Flowers of the same hue cover the mural on the street as well. She visits the street quite a bit, but not because of the mural. She can’t bear to look at it, with all its nice photographs and kind, shallow words. Pinks flowers and teddy bears. She visits to look at the tarmac, and wonders if they let his blood dry in the sun or if someone had to scrub it clean. In her mind, his body is still lying there, and she is pushing through the crowd, past the officers with their shining yellow coats. She’s in an ambulance, at a hospital, and no matter how many times she plays through it, the slight variations that come with the imperfect recreations held within her flimsy human memory, Danny never wakes up. He clings to unconscious life for a few hours, and then he dies. A silent, stagnant, boring few hours of nothing. Fragile little human beings. 

And the thought has crossed her mind more than once, somewhere along the path of those racing, spiralling circles, that she is fragile too. It would be just as easy, and just as boring. Just as over. 

She won’t, because she still has hope, withering to a bitter, blackened thing. Persistent, hellbent. 

Once, the Doctor would visit at least once a week, but after their false-alarm last-hurrah the gaps between his visits widened – at her request, of course, because life got in the way, and she was keeping it all secret from Danny. _Danny._ Heart shoved up into her throat, intestines unravelling, sinking, cold in her gut. She blinks away the feeling, and instead finds tears upon her cheeks, sticky, salty, starting to stream. The crying comes fast and unexpected. Most of the time she doesn’t cry at all. Crying is boring. It’s always the same, just water and redness and a feeling like her chest is caving in. Gaps between visits, (and the train of thought returns, the spirals are so much more bearable than the slumps) and he’s due for another fairly soon. In hindsight, she should have known she would never be able to give up her life with the Doctor, no matter how much Danny wanted her to. The Doctor learning, because she is teaching him. His days of war and conspiracy and legacy are over. Now he is one of them.

He is her friend, and if he loves her he will help her. 

When the Doctor finally arrives, she will do what she always seems to where the ones she cares about are concerned. She will lie, and plaster on a brave face. Everything’s okay. _Shut up and show me some planets._

She will lie, because she is owed. After every impossible thing she has done for the Doctor, she is owed at least this. 

…

Christmas is a lonely affair. 

She spends it in a house that’s far too big for one. In every room, the space yawns, and she can’t take it up, can’t fill it with enough noise. She snuggles under a homely crochet blanket in the sitting room. It is warm and yellow and almost like being held. The TV blares the usual Christmas drivel; special reruns, carol nights, old movies, talk shows, all of them draped in red and green and silver. She plays carols on the CD player late into the night, a form of self-torture, because she’s always hated christmas. Danny loved Christmas. She’s starting to get used to referring to him in the past tense. 

It was bad enough seeing him in the morgue. Silver trestle table with all its instruments alongside, plastic pulled back to show his face. At least they took the liberty of closing his eyes. But then he was trapped in a machinal imitation of the afterlife, calling out to her. She would have joined him if he asked, but of course he didn’t. Then she saw him in a graveyard, greyer than day-grey, a nightmare in silver. A dead thing walking, flesh of the face interlaced with wires simulating nerves, threaded under his skin. Pale skin, blood drained of colour, pooling, congealing by the wire incisions, dead eyes still carrying the slightest spark. He loved her until the very end. 

Afterwards, she held onto a golden glimmer of hope, because it seemed that the Doctor had found a way, as he always seemed to, to put everything right again. Zero consequences. She tried not to take it personally, when Danny sent a long-dead child back to Earth in his place. One soul, one contingency, and he gave his final chance away. He gave her chance away too, her one chance at a normal life. 

She tried, she really did. Put her all into the attempt, gave it a raring-hot go. Mundanity let her down, with its grief and its boredom. Just as she was beginning to ween herself off of her addiction to danger and adrenaline and making the impossible choice, she lost it all. Now she’s lost the Doctor too.

She had a choice to make, and she chose neither. Too late, the universe has chosen for you.

Clara and Danny planned to rent this house together months ago. A proper house for a proper couple – no more council estates and cramped apartments. They made all the necessary arrangements in advance. Teachers and their terminal planning. It seemed a waste not to put all those plans to use; the pros and cons and weighing up of a hundred different, practically-identical quiet suburban options. It’s not as if she could scope out a new apartment at this time of year. She doesn’t have the energy for it, and she can’t stay in her old place. She can’t spend another day there. She threw out the wilted, brown flowers, along with all of Danny’s things that had slowly accumulated in her apartment over the months. Clara once again packed her life up in boxes. No Doctor to help her this time, but that was ok. Most of the furniture belonged to the estate. Another chapter comes to a close. 

Now she has a new place in which to be alone. She told her friends she was spending Christmas with family, and her family that she was spending it with friends. A foolproof coverup. Just another lie. There’s only one person she wants to see. Well, two people, obviously, but only one of them is alive. But the Doctor may as well be gone, just as finally and objectively as Danny Pink, because he finally found it. He found Gallifrey. He deserves to be home, to be celebrated, to be among his own people. All that guilt and rage and loneliness finally placated. She should be happy for him, but she doesn’t have the energy to prop up the lie, not even in her own head.

She spends a lot of time reading, which is nice. Escapism and all that. But the conjured imagery and the vicariously lived experiences have nothing on the real thing. So much more thrilling when it’s your own life on the line, when the stakes are real and tangible and universe-threatening. 

This is her life now, and she’s quickly running short on cash. Some of Danny’s money sits in a shared bank account they set up for extra savings, but two teacher’s wages won’t buy her much more time. Probably she should get back to her job in the new year, settle into the year-by-year teaching cycle. Grow old and grey and wise. Lonely, because she promised Danny that those words were his, and no one else’s. No one else’s forever. The gratification of love, the surface-level affection and illusion of dependability, a symbiotic, chemical illusion – it isn’t worth the work, the lies, the mask you have to wear. It certainly isn’t worth the loss, later. Sometimes much later, and sometimes far too soon, but it always comes. 

She feels old, and small, and predictable. 

Christmas is a lonely affair, until it isn’t. 

After living through dreams within dreams within dreams, she is finally back where she belongs. The TARDIS, with the Doctor. It’s been nearly two months, for her at least. It’s always longer for him. 

She remembers wrinkles on her face, and a deep ache in her bones. Muscles disintegrating, implanted memories of a life left alone. A life without the Doctor. Whether a scenario conjured from her mind, or plucked from some unlived timeline, she isn’t sure. Lonely old woman in a lonely old house. Lots of travelling, of the earthbound sort. Lots of photographs on the mantelpiece. A full life, a good life – the sort of life one ought to be proud of, but one that Clara isn’t sure she could bear to live. She supposes that life doesn’t care about what you can bear, it goes on either way. 

The two of them were only reunited because of a dream. She supposes she has both their subconsciouses to thank for that. It makes her wonder who sent the dream-crabs to them in the first place, and if she had a penchant for the gothic aesthetic. 

Clara wraps her dressing gown around herself and stares up into the blue. The central pillar fades into luminance, vibrant and warm as fireglow. Beneath her feet, the machine whirrs, barks, hums, contented. 

Without fanfare, they take off, both of them hungry for the dizzy, airless feeling of the vortex. Clara feels at home in oblivion. It is far more comforting, and steadying, than mundanity. She thinks of the Doctor, alone in this big, old house. Far too big for one. 

Both of them have been smiling ever since they stepped into the box, swift pace, hand-in-hand, grinning. Now, as silence begins to settle, their smiles fade, and words hang unspoken. 

“You lied to me,” the Doctor says quietly, leaning upon the console’s edge. He looks older, and tireder. His hair is longer. There is no anger behind his words, it’s merely an observation. Square one; what do we do now?

“You lied to me,” she reminds him. Either side of a hug, hiding their faces from one another.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Me too.”

He presses his lips together into a small frown. Inhales, but stays silent. Words thought better of. He straightens up and fiddles with the controls. “Have you been doing okay?” he asks her idly. Pat on the back, voluntary slip. 

“Hey, that’s supposed to be my job.” Clara folds her arms and paces around the console’s circumference, pursuing him. “Are you?”

“I asked first.”

“I’m fine,” she says dismissively.

Hands dropped mid-motion. They hang, unsure. The Doctor turns to her, wearing an insufferable, knowing smile. “Always okay, is that right?”

“Yeah,” she replies. Finally, her turn to be inscrutable, evasive. She doesn’t look at him, and wonders how he likes it. “Something like that.”

“Well then, I suppose… I’m fine too.” His stare is piercing.

“Good,” Clara pats him affectionately on the arm, smiling. “That settles it then.” Clara grips the edge of the console and looks up into the amber glow of its core. 

“Why didn’t Danny come back from the nethersphere?” the Doctor asks gently. “One-way teleport. It should have worked.”

“He gave it to someone else,” Clara says, through a tensed jaw. He gave it to someone else, which was just like him. Hopelessly kind, hopelessly unfair. Even in death, he’s better than her. “Some kid, from the war. Civilian casualty.” And the Doctor knows all too well how much that sort of guilt stings. Children, caught in the crossfire. He used to carry the weight of 2.47 billion of them. “So Missy was lying?” Clara asks, pointedly changing the subject. 

“As always,” the Doctor says gravely.

“You never told me about her.”

“I thought she was dead.”

“Do you think she’s dead now?” she asks, emphatic. 

“I don’t like to make a habit of doubting the evidence of my own eyes,” he mutters, “but...”

“But you think she survived somehow,” she finishes, flashing him a knowing smirk. 

“She usually does,” the Doctor shrugs. “It’s like a party trick.” 

“So what is she,” Clara asks innocently, walking around the edge of the console, stroking the desktop, “like your evil ex or something?”

“No,” he drawls, deep. Full Scottish. “Well, maybe something like that, more of an old friend turned enemy.”

“Who likes to snog you full on the face?”

His expression contorts, though it isn’t quite disgust. Embarrassment, Clara thinks. “Winding me up, I expect.” Clara smiles and nods, making it plain that she doesn’t believe him. The Doctor’s face is screwed up in concentration, his arched eyebrows seem to ripple in the blinking lights, blue and gold. “Tell me, Clara, did you recognise her?”

“No, why would I recognise her? Told you, time-stream stuff is all gonzo,” she tries for humor, but he’s too preoccupied to notice. Furrowed face, fingers at his lips. 

“It was her, who gave you my number, put that ad in the paper. Drawing us together from the very beginning.” 

The woman in the shop. Clara casts her mind back, but she can’t quite remember what she looked like. It _might_ have been Missy. Like the Doctor, she supposes that they all delete faces when they stop needing them. Clara tries to picture her now, but she might be imagining the image. A small, middle aged woman with blue eyes and a polo shirt to match. A big red badge reading ‘How may I help you?’ Clara turns to the Doctor, trying to look as if the news doesn’t bother her. “Why?” 

“I don’t know,” he admits, with a defeated sigh. 

“She’s your enemy, why would she find you a friend?”

“Maybe, to prove – to prove she knows me better than anyone, by finding me the perfect match,” he suggests, clearly not believing it. 

“Thanks, I think.” An enemy that’s also your wingman. A bit unconventional, and more than a bit sinister, regarding the future of their engagement. “Think that’s all it is?”

“Maybe.” His tone is unconvincing. 

Silence drips in, viscous, uncomfortable, coating the room. Clara could swear that the lights deepen to a darker blue. His expression deepens, scowl settling. They burrow deep, these scowls of his, these moods, and Clara is almost angry. They’ve been over this already, and yet part of him still suspects the worst. A trick, a trap. She feels as if she’s standing on the cliff’s edge again, beneath a white voidful sky. 

Clara sidles over to him slowly and takes his arm in both of hers, clothed in fluffy, pale blue. Her robe glows beneath the lights. With a smile, she rests her head against his arm. She feels his stiff spine begin to relax. It’s not exactly a hug, so he can’t complain. “Thank you for coming back.”

“Thank you for waking up.” 

She very nearly didn’t, from her perfect life with Danny Pink, ice-cream pain eating up her brain, and chalk on the walls. A glimpse of the life she might have had, if she had chosen differently. 

“Never mind all that, never mind any of it,” the Doctor says, and gold retakes the atmosphere. He reaches up and puts his hand on hers, guiding it away from his arm and towards the console. “The universe awaits, just like old times.” 

And the choice is made. “Yeah,” she says. “Let’s go.”

He places her hand on the dematerialisation lever, long fingers curled over her own. “Well then,” he murmurs, smiling gently. “Geronimo.” 

They pull down on the lever together, and the engines begin to groan.

**The Time Vortex,** **∞**

John lugs his large backpack into the TARDIS console room on the return trip, picking it up from where it sits next to his abandoned barstool. Oswin can hazard a guess at what’s in there: communicators, a staser or two, gadgets to hack into the TARDIS circuitry, maybe some grenades. She hasn’t had a run in with a grenade in a lovely long while – she almost misses the way that the earth rumbles and the crater spreads out around her, untouched. Oswin wonders if the young agent knows his weapons are useless against her. 

He truly is a puzzle, because he isn’t particularly good. CIA operatives are elite, and they can certainly do undercover. She’s met enough of them to know. This kid is rubbish at undercover, spilling his life story, along with a few glaring anachronistic details, at the slightest prompt. Either the Time Lords are getting lax with their training nowadays, or he’s here for good reason. To be frank, she’s a little offended. Surely they would only send their very best after her, after everything she’s done. She’s made a right mess of time, slicing through their silver web. She’s taken lives – entire planets of them – and the Time Lords send an amateur recruit. 

Oswin tries not to look too disappointed as she walks back to the console room, shutting the door to the diner behind her. 

“So,” she chirps, bounding up onto the raised platform at the centre of the room. John peers around from the other side of the console, the amber pillar glaring between them. “Planets it is, yeah? Are you ready to see something awesome?”

“What, awesomer than that view?”

“Even awesomer, promise,” Oswin grins, leaning over the controls. 

John mirrors her expression; wry and daring. It’s sad, knowing that he’s only pretending. Oswin misses when people would look at her like that; with unadulterated awe and excitement. She pushes herself back upright and gets to work. She punches out another carefully memorised pattern of buttons and dials and levers. Fishing them out of the vortex and towards a set of coordinates she recalls as effortlessly as an often-dialled phone number. It’s one of her favourites. Her very first sight of the truly awesome. 

The TARDIS wheezes thickly as it settles into place. John’s eyes are glued to the far, circular window. 

“Just looks like more space,” he remarks, at the vacuum of stars beyond, currents of pale light streaming past, granular debris pulled together into gravitational gullies. 

“Well it’s all just space, really – but why don’t you take another look from the front,” Oswin says, holding her arm aloft to indicate the doors. 

She lets him do the honors, and to his credit he makes a decent show of it. A gasp, wide eyes, slow, cautious steps. It’s a little overdone. 

“I present to you,” Oswin says, following him out of the console room, “the Rings of Akhaten!” she bounds across the linoleum to stand beside him. Oswin nudges him playfully. “Still think I’m tricking you?”

“Suppose not,” he mutters, breathless. Perhaps she’s only growing fond of the boy, but she’s almost certain that his smile is genuine. 

In the diner itself, the rectangular front windows blaze red. Beyond, a vibrant, undulating sphere of gaseous light; white and orange and yellow suffused into a broiling cocktail of elements. The star of the system of seven worlds. The people of this system call it the old God; a parasitic cosmic being that feeds on potential energy, the memories infused in precious things. A few centuries before this moment, the parasitic consciousness was vanquished by the vast memories of a Time Lord, and a single autumn leaf. 

Walking towards the front of the diner, Oswin feels something that she hasn’t felt in a long while: a vertiguous sense of the sublime. It’s difficult to find a sight so massive, so breathtakingly beautiful, that it humbles her. She’s seen bigger stars, more beautiful, nebulous hues, but something about this place never fails to ground her, to return her to a sense of reality. With infinite freedom, reality has become her own. Hers to wield, and to shape. Akhaten reminds her of the twenty-four year old prospect-less university graduate who stood here, and first felt the light of an alien sun. 

She chose this place for three reasons, but she only feels comfortable admitting the first to herself. It’s the first location that popped into her head, a beautiful sight to show her new not-companion.

The second is that it would make a fitting final stop, if it comes to that. Coming full circle, before the end. Oswin still isn’t sure if she wants it to come to that. 

The third reason is that stars have memories. At least, stars once inhabited by parasitic Gods feeding upon the psychic energy of seven worlds for millennia have memories. Inevitable scars dragged through its molten iron haze. It is, perhaps, the closest Oswin can get to an abandoned battlefield on Trenzalore that no longer exists, scrubbed clean from time by its presiders. There is history swimming in this star, and hanging in the air, surging through its gravity streams. Her own history, and the Doctors. They are one history, in a way. Inextricably, irrevocably, abominably linked. 

She has an impossible hunch, concerning this boy, and this place might give her answers. 

Oswin leads John out of the front doors to stand upon the plateau surfacing a meteorite suspended in the slowest-spinning of the surrounding gravity belts. Before them, the mainland of Akhaten’s capital floats. Oswin can just make out the tarps of the open market, and the bulbous towers of the palace upon the peak of the formation. On an adjacent island, the golden pyramid reflects the star’s light in a twinkling flare of brilliance

She tells the boy all she knows about Akhaten and the surrounding system, showing off. All the while she wonders to herself why she is letting this drag on. 

She could confront him, here and now. She might be able to run and leave him stranded here. Then he could call his CIA squadrun for backup and be on his way back to Gallifrey. Better yet, she could throw him from the TARDIS’ oxygen bubble and into the surrounding vacuum of heat and stony debris. He’s stronger than her, but she can’t be hurt. If she took him by surprise, got a few good blows in... but she won’t. She can’t. He’s just a kid. A kid staring in genuine wonder at the light striking the golden pyramid of Akhaten. She knows that his awe is genuine, because his acting is abysmal. 

He is a mystery, of purple light and a familiar ache, though try as she might Oswin can’t place the feeling. From all her many, many years of travelling, almost anything can feel familiar, so much so that the disorientating twist of déjà vu is a near constant companion. Familiar doesn’t mean anything to her anymore, like a word too often repeated. Oswin concentrates on the fading sensation; heat and tightness and sureness. A red leaf drifts through the dark. 

It could be that her mind is deteriorating, finally giving into an old compulsion, a soul-deep pull. Even Time Lord memory blocks degrade over time. In the light of the sun, the feeling is amplified; lives twisted together, run and _remember._ The shape of its scars strike a familiar silhouette, and its standing right beside her. 

She is beginning to suspect something that is very, very impossible. 

While her thoughts travel, spiralling down, her mouth keeps on working away, talking and saying nothing. She learnt from the best. Oswin reels off facts and figures and names that might as well be made up for the sense they would make to the average human. 

“What do you think?” Oswin asks John. To his credit, he has remained raptly fixated upon the scene before him. His interest in her explanation seems real, though that might be wishful thinking on her part. 

“It’s beautiful,” he says. His dark eyes glisten in the golden light. Again, Oswin is reminded of a simple fact; this boy is a terrible liar. Perhaps this has been a revelation for him as well. 

He’s not good enough to know she’s onto him. She could surprise him. 

She could escape. 

She should end this whole charade right now – but that would mean passing up a highly convenient opportunity. If it were left to her, she might not return to Gallifrey for a long, long while. Dying is an unfavourable option, when infinity awaits. This way, the choice is made for her. She is simply failing to resist capture. She is tired, and just this once, it might be okay to rest, to stop running.

Just this once, it might be okay to lose.

Oswin is woefully indecisive, always has been. Mind changing on a whim, on the wind (boundless, weightless). Her head is beginning to ache. She weighs up her options. 

She could go to her demise knowing and accepting, yet forced to grapple with her self-destructive choice all the way. To face the fact that after all this time, after coming the long, _long_ way round, this is the optimal solution. Would it be all that horrible to let him take her back? He’ll probably get a lovely little medal or a promotion for apprehending a dangerous fugitive, and she won’t have to worry about where she might be headed, in her increasingly desperate attempts to pass the time. 

If the Time Lords sent a better agent, and she was left unaware of her capture until the final moment, the shock might have sent her into a panic. She might have fought, tried to escape. Would that be more or less dignified? To cling to her stolen time, or become so weakened by it, so watered down, that she believes death to be a mercy. 

Whether a mercy to herself, or the universe, she isn’t sure. 

Oswin isn’t sure when exactly she stopped speaking. She supposes that she ran out of facts and anecdotes to recall. She is fairly sure that she already told John the story of the Old God and Mary Gajelh. An old woman, repeating old, half-faded memories. 

John is gazing down at her expectantly. He clears his throat, and breaks the silence. “So, where did you get a time machine – are you from the future?” The questions are really quite adorable. He must have just remembered that a human would wonder about such things. 

“Yes, actually, but not all that far. If I tell you where, do you promise not to tell?” she casts him a conspiratorial look. John nods. Oswin smirks, tapping the side of her nose. “I totally stole it.”

“From who?” He tries to look innocent when he asks, but Oswin can sense his vindictiveness. His disgust. 

“Aliens, obviously.”

“What sort of aliens?”

“The time travelling sort. Keep up” 

She might still have time to change course. Maybe if Me were still here, she would. If Me were still here, she would never have let Oswin fall for such an obvious trap, deliberately or not. 

“Can we go somewhere else?” 

“Aren’t you eager,” Oswin says slyly. May as well stop stringing him along, give him the opportunity he so desperately wants to get up close and personal with the TARDIS controls. It’s time to puzzle out the impossible feeling gripping at her chest. The memories left by the ghost of the Old God could be just as false and faded as her own. Familiarity found where none exists. “Are you tired, John?”

“Not really.”

“It was already late when you got to the diner. It’d be almost morning now,” she makes sure to add an interrogatory edge, just to keep him on his toes, make him wonder if she knows more than she’s letting on. “As for me, I’m thoroughly exhausted. I’m gonna tuck in.”

Confused, he glances back at the diner. “Where?”

“Bedrooms. Didn’t I mention the ship is infinite?”

He smiles in disbelief. “Must have forgotten that part.”

“Well, it is. You’ll find a bedroom if you wander down the hall some ways and think very hard about sleeping.” Oswin turns on her heels and goes back inside, the doors’ tinny chimes ringing an uncanny contrast among the distant worlds and revolving asteroid belts. 

“This place is impossible,” John mutters. 

“Best start believing then.” 

Oswin skips across the linoleum and back into the console room. Frowning, she stares at the screen affixed to the desktop. It displays circular runes belonging to a language that she has never been able to parse. Me understood bits and pieces of the Gallifreyan language, but it is impossible to fully comprehend without the context that telepathy provides, no matter how augmented one’s mind is by the artificial. Oswin understands enough, from the red warning lights and deliberately muted alarms, that something is going wrong. Safeguards broken through. This might be her only chance to undo the damage that her bespoke CIA agent has done. 

A pull in her gut, his eyes a pellucid purple, and the star of Akhaten, its God vacated, scarred by weaponised memory, spewing its vestiges. An erased memory constructed by the hole it leaves behind, and somehow he _fits_. A shared history, perhaps, scent clinging to his coat like wind to a traveller’s. Somehow, he is tied to the Doctor, just like her. It can’t be anything more than that, and yet her impossible hunch persists. There’s only one way to know for certain. 

“Are you okay?” Oswin isn’t sure when John came to be standing beside her. She turns away from the screen displaying the temporal coordinates of what can only be Gallifrey, their destination, soon to be irrevocably locked in. Concern flashes across John’s face, but not for her, for himself. For his mission. Oswin pulls back from the TARDIS screen and grins. Best to go for clueless – stupid, oblivious human. Time Lords, she’s found, are too proud to question the truth of the act. 

“Oh yeah,” Oswin shrugs. “I’m always okay.” Okay is relative. 

She stares into his eyes for what is perhaps a little too long, judging by the uncomfortable expression that quickens upon his face. Head tilted up, she surveys him. A flash of sensation, fading even now. So achingly familiar, so deeply buried. So viscerally impossible. “You sure?” he asks. 

“Yeah, ‘course,” she chirps, and straightens up. “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone. Head down the hall if you get sleepy, or hungry, or anything really,” she waves her hand is a manic gesture. “Ship’s a generous host.”

“I think if I go to sleep I’ll probably wake up on the truck I hitched a ride in,” he chuckles to himself, and he looks as if he tries to summon a flash of genuine fear behind the admission, but there is far too much hunger in his eyes for the act to ring true. He keeps glancing askance at the console, fingers twitching at his sides. 

“You really think you could have dreamed this up? Quite the imagination you’ve got there.”

“Yes, suppose so.” Distracted, the act slipping. Oswin resists the urge to roll her eyes. He isn’t even bothering to try, and it’s insulting. 

Oswin flashes him a final smile as she skips down the steps from the platform. “Sweet dreams,” she says as she leaves the console room, passing through the smart stone archway that leads onto the rest of the ship.

A corridor of sleek metal inlaid with yet more bookshelves, old-fashioned dark sconces set into the walls, their artificial flames flickering sulphur-yellow. It took centuries for the TARDIS to begin to recognise her, to trust her. To break beyond the barrier of still-time surrounding her being, and dig through her memories. Contact with the telepathic circuits, memories backed-up and relayed to the machine through Me’s electronics. They found a workaround, and made the place their own. The ship saw a childhood spent exploring the castles of the English countryside, or tucked away in library corners and by window-set reading nooks. Lost in fairytales. The smoke that wafts from the engines, siphoned through cooling vents set into the upper walls, smells like her mother’s souffles. 

Thousands of years ago, Oswin – before she settled upon the name – reversed the polarity of a Gallifreyan neuro-block. It struck both her and the Doctor, clinging onto one, tracing every aspect of their existence like a stencil, and cutting the shape of it from the other. A hard reset. The little machine shuntered and sparked, its compressed temporal batteries overheating, leaking sickly timonic acid. To seperate them was to cut barbed-wire from the body of a wounded animal, caught in the fence. So tied were they, the claws of one buried deeply into the flesh of the other. Which is which, Oswin has often wondered, in that gruesome metaphor? The fawn or the blade? The fishhook or the eye? 

She was torn from the Doctor’s memory, red threads of fate ripped free, and the scarring was atrocious. In doing so, his hold over her was equally relinquished. With no caretaker to maintain them, the safeguards he built within her mind, fortresses against the infernal, sparking light – the bone dust and fire and black caves – began to erode. Add to that a vast swath of time, and the walls became nothing but ruins. A constant siege; canons trained upon the battlements and soldiers battering at the gates. She’s been plugging every breach and hole with mud and plaster for centuries. Bandaid solutions, all this time, because he was right, it’s maddening. Always there, just below, always clamouring to catch up. Part of her is still trapped in the darkness, and always will be. An intruder scattered across a timeline like sprinkles, or shrapnel, lodged into the skin, infecting its wounds. 

Me was an expert on technology involving memory, given all the eons she dedicated to extending her own, and blocking out the worst of it. She reprogrammed the neuroblock to replace the walls, but still the protection was weak. One flimsy Time Lord device against a thousand splintered lifetimes, paradox upon paradox like a ball of paint, teeming, vibrant. Madness is only ever a thought away. Remove the final bricks of the fortress, wave the white flag. To give up, and give in. All this time, her mind has been lagging behind, always pulling her back to the graveyard that never was. She might not be able to pull herself out again if she returns, but no harm done. She’s locked on a terminal course to Gallifrey regardless. 

Oswin goes to the zero room. A chamber of pure white, constructed as a place of recovery for Time Lords, of psychic detox, a pall of healing mist treating physical and psychological and temporal injuries alike. Good for concentration, too, like a sensory deprivation tank. 

The neuroblock is inside. It waits, the unassuming silver disc that has so thoroughly warped her existence, and made her into what she is today. She isn’t sure whether she should be thanking it or telling it off. Probably neither. 

She fears for her sanity, in her old age. 

The door slides shut behind her with a hiss, and Oswin is alone in a void of white. 

White as an extraction chamber, wrenched back from the brink of death, heart frozen in her chest. She breathes; gut deep. It steadies her, despite its pointlessness. It’s only human, to be steadied, comforted, by pointless things. Little rituals. She’s kept them close for so long, clinging, grasping. Losing her grip. 

Oswin sits cross-legged on the temperate ground. She takes the little silver disk in her palms. 

Perhaps it’s time that she understood the full story. She hopes she can cling to consciousness long enough to see her trip to Gallifrey through, and give the pompous lot of them a proper telling off on her way back to the grave. She isn’t even sure that it will work. It’s difficult, she expects, to drag a being back through time to the eye of an encircling paradoxical storm when they don’t exist within time to begin with. Contradiction upon contradiction. Sour, like too much marmalade. 

“Alright then,” Oswin tells the machine, letting out a long sigh. “Do your worst, I suppose.”

Oswin activates the neuroblock, and the earth below the fortress splits asunder, sinkholes gaping wide. The ruins are swallowed by the soil. Oswin doesn’t fight, leaning into the old sensation. Beyond the wall, fires rage on the horizon, and a cliff’s edge looms. The sun sparks – no, not the sun, a column of white light, twisting, crimson ink droplets tainting its purity with colour. Red threads of fate, calling to her. 

She walks, and stops at the precipice. She tells the empty air to run, and to remember, before she begins to fall. 

Dream bleeding into memory, an inferno rages around her body. 

She’s a leaf on the wind. An autumn leaf, crimson to brown, crumbling away. She’s scattered; pieces breaking off and swept away in the gale, the torrent. It’s like fire – a vortex of flame, its light sparkling in her eyes like stars.

Electrodes at her skull, fur at her throat, too hot, and electricity rockets through her skull. There’s a rogue entity hijacking the minds of broken Daleks on a desolate asylum planet, rising against their creators – but she is not one of them. She is not a Dalek.

Clara feels the cold bite of snow at her back, a bludgeon of old stone to the head. A warm hearth and salty rain. He presses a kiss to her forehead.

A warehouse bathed in blue light, and a monster wearing the skin of a man. She’s lived in this town for twenty-four years. The energy of the telepathic blast clings to her, magnetised, because she and the creature are one and the same. 

Stone falls from the sky, blood pours from her neck. The air laughs and laughs as the forest floor crushes her bones. A green eye watches, and it tells her that they will meet again.

The crack in the cement blares white, and it sings. There is a man in a bowtie gripping her shoulder tight, laughing, manic. Within the wall, the creature growls a rending groan of frustration. 

The machine taunts, and her comrades stand, suited, puppeteered, dead. The scholars listen through her earpiece, documenting her every word. All the legends she has ever known are true. She opens her mind and –

Slices through a horde of metal corpses by the silver temple of Azaroth. The purple trees sway and she screams for the empress to run. The royal protector keels, falls 

To her knees. “You,” she murmurs, but the Doctor doesn’t hear her. It isn’t recognition, just a well-rehearsed line. He potters away through the tunnels of the London Underground. She hears the rumbling in the distance of a

Thousand Dalek ships. She throttles the warship’s mighty engines, and it drives onwards toward its sure destruction at the core of the molten gas cloud. “Clever,” she whispers – and she is. Proper brilliant. She stares into the symbol upon the control panel as the fires rise to meet her. Rassilion’s seal burnishes itself onto her dying eyes as she 

Dies, her comrade cradling her fading form. “Boy,” she whispers. The cyberfleet will lose this battle, thanks to her. A tear falls from her comrade’s cheek and 

Lands upon the dark asphalt. It is beginning to rain. “And –” the sound catches in her throat as the rainwater fills her mouth, torrential. There’s a steel bullet in her heart, and a leaf blows through the alleyway. 

“Remember,” she tells the boy, though he cannot hear her. He thinks that she is only a dream. Just another nightmare, between the darkness, and the dead eyes, and the daily, brutal experiments. The convent on the mountain is burning, and the flames will take her and the creature both. 

Countless other scenes; across time and space. Short lives, knitted together at their final moment, returning home join the bone dust littering the cavern floor. 

_But I can remember, Doctor. You don’t understand, I can remember it all. Every time._

It burns, but even so, a smile curls her lips. She knows what she’s seeking, what she’s meant for, and where the pieces of her are heading in the swift, tearing current. 

She is seeking a boy who is not named John, with dark skin and purple eyes. Abyssal purple, clamouring for her attention, below the outcrop of the deepest pit. 

It really was, just as her mother said, the most important leaf in human history. 

She lands on a mountain top, the peak of a brown, cragged summit where the air is thin and cold. Fog coats the world beneath in a greyish pall, and the intruder can just make out the odd dark glimpse of t ground between the wisps; buttes and inselbergs and craters woven into the flat. Beneath that, a network of old, bone-littered caves. Catacombs. She hates catacombs. 

There is a figure beside her, gazing over the edge with a flat palm against their brow, engaged in a pantomimic search. Long and pale, their features are blurred and indistinct, hair long and silvery blonde. A drab, grey coat hangs about their calves where they sink into the stone, a part of the mass. 

“You can barely see a thing from up here,” it says, in a woman’s voice, its tone flat and noncommittal. “Sometimes I see them down there, scurrying about. Insects between anthills, but they can’t see me.” The peak of the mountain seems to shrink to a pinprick, but still the woman balances upon it, precarious. The intruder makes her way down through the fog. This isn’t who she came for. 

On an outcrop on the mountainside sits a man with silver hair. Down here, the fog is thin, just a grey haze over the black-soiled charnel house. His eyes are grey as London sky, and they stare through her. “Better keep going,” he says. “Your boyfriend’s further down.”

“Shut up,” she echoes a forgotten tone. “I don’t have a boyfriend.” 

The man shrugs, and goes on staring over the edge. He doesn’t seem to blink. 

Her boyfriend is at the base of the mountain, idly kicking stones with wide, careening motions. “Hello,” he calls, and the sound is thin. Tinny and plastic and false. He doesn’t look at her. “You really aren’t supposed to be here – actually it’s probably impossible.” He kicks a large rock loose from the formation and it skitters across the flat. This isn’t who she came for. 

Some way along, at one of the cave entrances, a man in a leather jacket dances a partner’s waltz alone. Across the plain, the warrior gazes at the crimson fires on the horizon, facing away from all the rest, as if he’s been banished to time-out. 

The intruder passes more of them in the cave system, tucked away in alcoves or skipping along the cavern paths. Some speak to her and some ignore her. Some are curious, or angry, or confused, or jovial, but none of them are who she came for. 

In the cave, she comes to a dead end, a thin wall of rock. Indistinct voices call from within, distorted behind the separating mass. 

“We’re not sure how many are in there,” a voice behind her says. Tall, white-haired, ruffled sleeves and bright cravat.”No way for us to get in, nor for them to get out, I’m afraid.” He puts a hand up to the rockface, and still the voices clamour behind it, muddied to a tangled mass of noise. 

“But you’re the only one here,” the intruder reminds him, stepping closer to the wall. “Nothing here but you.”

“Well yes, generally speaking. And yet, you are here.”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“We’re all here,” the old man smiles sadly, dropping his hand from the rockface. “Take your pick.”

The intruder exits the cave, though she feels she is lost within it for quite some time. A labyrinth of twisting, caverns; shifting, crumbling, reforming. Beyond the caves there is a plateau. Rugged stone, grazed-flesh red and soot black – flat, all the way to the outcrop. As she walks towards it, its distance extends, stretching out in front of her. 

As she approaches the precipice, a small voice calls out; “stop!” Clara turns and sees a pale slade peering from behind a jagged rock formation. The child steps out, bare-footed on the spiked, pitted stone. A boy, with sandy hair and dark red robes, a clumsily-tied golden sash trailing in a breeze she cannot feel in the dead, briny air. Dimly, the intruder remembers this boy. She sat with him as he cried and ran her fingers through his hair. “Don’t go so close to the edge,” he warns, eyes wide and panicked. Deep, starry blue. 

“Why not?”

“Because you might fall down.”

“I want to fall,” she tells him, certain despite her fear. “I’m looking for someone.” Purple sings beneath her feet. “They’re down there.”

“There’s no one down there.” The boy steps closer, curious. 

“How do you know if you’ve never looked?” 

“Because it’s just dark. All dark forever and ever.” He shivers as he speaks, little chest fluttering beneath his tunic. 

“Nothing there in the dark that there isn’t in the light,” she reminds him. The boy doesn’t seem comforted by this in the slightest. 

“Of course there is. The dark isn’t there in the light, it goes away.” He furrows his thin brows, puzzled by her ignorance. “There _is_ something in the dark. In the light you just can’t see it.” 

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

He shakes his head, backing away. He seems to blend into the rockface, sink into the soil, fade into the dust-choked air. 

The intruder holds her breath (and dimly remembers that she shouldn’t have to breathe at all). She tilts her weight forwards, and falls. 

There is no leaf to be scattered this time, just a stem, a core, and in the heat it shrivels, blackens, brittles. There are no more echoes left, the walls here absorb all sound. She passes faint impressions, shadows on the cave walls, their true meanings lost. There are holes left from where they were cut out; artfully, deliberately. Swirling greens and oranges and reds, a figure without a face streaking through the pit. They run, kicking up a storm of paradoxes and loops and buttered-over temporal blunders, an instrument. A blank slate. Its form comes into focus as her fall begins to slow. From below, sunlight streams, weak and strained, brightening. Black collar, red eye-liner, a loneliness in his eyes that cannot be expressed. There’s a clock on a wooden desk sparking yellow and electric blue. An excruciating, throat-tearing scream in her ears. 

It’s not only the memory that’s been scrubbed away – a mind reached into and trimmed, edited – it’s time. The Doctor’s timestream reached into and altered, redacted, brutalised. Great swaths of it wedged free and scrubbed clean by gnarled, mechanical hands. 

The intruder stops falling. 

She lies upon a shining copper platform, and white cyclic runes watch her from the walls. The person she is looking for stands above her, looking down at her crumpled form crumpled of tangled limbs and green tartan. There is no bone dust or soil here, only metal, polished to a blinding sheen. 

“You can’t be here,” he says. He might be a boy, or a man. Perhaps a king, judging by the elegance of his attire. So much for pleasantries – the one she is looking for doesn’t even offer her a helping hand. Impossible suspicion impossibly confirmed. This man is the same as the boy on the cliff’s edge, and the men in the catacombs – the warrior on the plateau and the woman at the summit. There’s only one person here. 

“Nice to meet you too.” 

“This is impossible,” says the king. 

“Yeah, that’s sort of my whole thing,” she shrugs. “Ever wondered what’s up there,” she tilts her head up to indicate the ceiling. The golden walls fade into thick, treacly dark. Far above, an inferno rages. The vestiges of its heat play upon her eyes. War fires and petrichor. 

“There’s nothing up there but darkness,” the king explains. Something flashes across his eyes when he says it. A sheen of silvery fear. “You can’t be here. It’s, it’s…” he searches for the right word. “It’s an _abomination_ , a perversion of time.” He clasps the collar of his layered robes, red and gold, lined with runic embroidery. A shrill chime rings through the metal chamber, like the chinking of glass. There is no ignoring the fear now, his eyes bulge with it. “You can’t stay,” he tells her. “The doctor is here.” 

Another chink of glass. The man disappears in a sweep of crimson and gold. Liquid bubbles away to a boil, electricity hums, motors whirr. A machine, a laboratory. There’s a shadow on the wall with a syringe in its hand. The intruder walks towards the noise.

It occurs to her that she’s found the one she was looking for, and that this is the part where she is meant to stop. Already she is beginning to forget where exactly she is supposed to be returning to. Wherever it is, it’s an awful long way to climb. She doesn’t want to stop yet. There are more questions than answers in this abyss, and she intends to find them. 

The next room is gold as well, but smaller, oppressively so. A quaint laboratory with orange sunlight streaming through the window, bulbous sets of glassware arranged in snaking, spiralling patterns, bubbling fluorescent colour. Stacks of blueprints litter the worktops, and papers of scrawled notes and diagrams are pinned upon the wall. It might have been cosy, but for the fear clinging to every molecule in the air. 

There is a child on the operating table and the child has no face. 

Its entire body swarms and writhes in a blurred mass, shifting faster than her eyes can keep track of. Body growing, shrinking, set back, never allowed to live for long before the fire – it dances around the body in licks and spurts and trailing motes, whining, singing, screaming. Skin of every shade, hair of every hue, its hearts are the only thing that remains steady, twin beats pounding an ostinato of four. The robes are always the same; long and plain and grey. 

The expression is always the same; pain and confusion and fear. 

There are screams that call from underground, and a voice from the stars, beckoning, mourning. The intruder looks out the window and sees a village stretched out below on the plains of a craggy desert. On the mountain atop the cliffs ringing the valley, a black temple is burning. 

She turns back, and the child is gone. The wall is gone too, and the metal gives way to a plain of shifting sands, blowing into the laboratory upon a sharp, hot breeze. The glassware is spotted with dust and heat, beginning to blacken, to crack. 

There’s a child standing on the sand, dressed in robes of red and gold; dark-skinned and wide eyed in wonder. Her gaze follows a little toy spaceship clutched in one hand, as she pulls it in a switching arc around her head, lips pursed and pushed through with air to imitate the sound of flight. The innocence of the scene stings, it has teeth, because beneath the image of the child something else stirs; longing and loss. The intruder walks towards her. 

“Umm, hello,” the intruder calls, keeping her voice warm and high pitched. Unthreatening. 

“Hello,” to her surprise, the girl doesn’t jump – she doesn’t even turn – just drops her arm to her side, the toy of dented metal and carved wood clutched tightly in her small fingers. She smiles, soft and sad. It’s not the wide, toothy sort of a grin that a child normally wears.

“I like your spaceship.” The intruder crouches down in front of the child. 

“How did you get here?”

“Me? Oh, I fell, I suppose. Long way down,” the intruder shrugs. “This is just the bottom of a very deep hole.” 

The child’s dark eyes widen with incredulity. “That’s what I told her, but I don’t think she believes me.” 

“Told who?”

“The doctor.”

“Hurry up!” a voice calls. A friend, perhaps. The intruder looks around, but can’t find its source. 

The girl takes a step towards the intruder and whispers. “Do you remember where you fell from?” 

The intruder wracks her scrambled brains. A white room, a blue dress, a terminal voyage. The details slip from her mind. She remembers a cup of scalding black coffee. “Not really,” she admits.

“I don’t either,” says the girl, looking down at the ruddish sands. 

“Come on!” the voice shouts again. 

“I have to go. He’s teaching me how to climb the cliffs.” 

The intruder glances up at its looming edge. “Be careful up there.” 

The child nods, and as she darts away with a swish of her red sash in the wind, the intruder catches a glimpse of her eyes; their depth, their blackness. There are stars in them, and a purple light. She falls into it. 

And the light is above her now, rippling across a pale sky. 

She stands upon a vast field of mint-green grass. Flat, each blade cut to pristine precision and wavering in a uniform plane of verdance. A forest rings the field in a perfect radial arc; dense pines, dark, thin trunks reaching high above rich black soils, creating a dense canopy. Fro the horizon, grey mountains watch, and in the sky shine two suns, and a third speck, faint pink beyond the thin cloud cover across the lilac sky. From another perspective, the speck might be red. In the centre of the field there is a tower.

It’s base is a great stone plateau of pale grey, and a ridged ring in the centre holds the base of the tower, two great stumps of stone curve into needlepoints at their peaks, thrust up amongst the pellucid clouds. From between their points, the purple light radiates, the colour that has been calling her all this time. In its centre, the light is a vibrant indigo pool, glow reaching out to magenta, violet, fuschia, wavering in pleats and folds like wind-tossed fabric in the air, wrapping it, twisting. Time tastes altered as the air; slowed, torn, damaged. The tower sings. The light draws her eye, gentle hands upon her chin, tilting her gaze up and up and _in._ Stars twinkle in its centre, and the intruder catches a glimpse of pure gold swimming across the black. 

No, not an intruder, an explorer. A pioneer. Instinctively, she walks towards the tower, transfixed by its beckoning light. She can’t shake the sensation that there is someone watching her from the other side, perpetually hidden. 

Maybe not a pioneer after all. There is someone waiting for her at the base of the tower. 

There is a woman dressed in red standing upon the stone dias, hands in her pockets, head craned up at the violet sky. Her blonde hair hangs lank and greasy, split ends reaching toward her slumped shoulders. As the intruder approaches, the woman looks down at her, and a small, hard smile curls her lips. Pleasantly surprised. 

“You’re here,” she says, pulling her hands out of her pockets. She wrinkles her brow, “of course you’re here. I suppose you never left. Can barely feel your footfalls along the path.” Her gaze trails away. “Just another lost soul, rattling around in here,” the woman taps the side of her head. There is chalk dust on her fingers. 

“You’re different to the others,” the intruder observes, stepping towards her. She looks up at the woman, brows furrowed in thought. “This is impossible.”

“That’s what I thought. But then I figured, hey,” she sniffs, “it’s not like I have anything else to lose.”

“How?”

“Little run in with the Matrix, wielded by a lunatic. I drew upon this place to overload the system. Dangerous, obviously, and the vestiges linger. Thought it was about time I had a proper look. Awful lot of it,” she whispers, gazing up at the light once more, “stretching on ahead.” 

The intruder can’t quite puzzle her out. She isn’t like the others; echoes, snippets of broken speech and jumbled memories. She is whole, in mind, but in body she is somewhere else. The intruder can smell sweat in her clothes, and old stone. A galvanic stench like overheating machinery. 

“Abomination, right?” the woman shrugs. “That’s the agreed upon word for it. A Time Lord in their own time stream, scattered throughout their own life. It’s a bit different for us, seeing as we won’t be fractured. Protected against that sort of thing, harded like an egg in the sun – if the sunlight is the winds of time. For us it’s more like… like eating yourself up, from the inside. A paradox rotting through every infinitesimal instance of your existence. They used to do things like this to soldiers in the war – great weapons that turned you inside out, cannibalised every moment of your existence. They called them Neverweres. Not very creative, I know, but it was a highly stressful time.” Her words flow without sense and without end. Her expression is blank and lonely. 

“You seem okay,” the intruder observes. Not rotten, not cannibalised. 

“I’m always okay,” the Doctor whispers. The name comes to the intruder with the familiar turn of phrase. The familiar lie.

“Relatively speaking, I mean,” the intruder corrects herself. “To be honest you look a bit of a mess.”

The woman smiles, and again looks up into the light. It seems to draw the woman’s gaze just as vehemently as her own.

“Does it go further down, this hole?” The intruder asks. The ground doesn’t quite feel solid. Black ice, wont to crack and slide into icy waters at any moment. 

“Yes. There’s below, there’s above – a great blank space in the middle, and hundreds more stolen years besides, behind the catacomb walls. I don’t know how deep it goes, or if deep is even the right word for it. Are there three dimensions, down there?” she taps a booted foot against the white stone. “Does space exist at all? Maybe there’s no depth at all, or no gravity. Nowhere to fall, or no way.” She presses her eyes shut and breathes out a long sigh. “But yes, there is more. Multitudes,” she whispers. “This isn’t really my time, down here. Not my memories. I’m only an observer. An intruder. It’s all been separated from me.” Into the light again. It glazes the woman’s eyes a rippling indigo, and a familiar flash of fear sears beneath it. 

“Are you scared?” the first intruder asks. 

“Always,” replies the second. 

“Are you sad?” 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I thought I was angry, angrier than I’d ever been, but I might just be tired. Resigned.” She scuffs her boot heel against the stone, and the scrap snags the silence like a thunderclap. “There comes a time, when you’ve been fooled, deluded, the same way so many times that you think surely, _surely,_ it won’t hurt the next time. Distance makes the hearts grow fonder, I suppose.”

Silence descends; the clouds hang low, the light intensifies. On all sides, the prairie sways, undulating. “What are you doing here?” the woman asks. 

“I’m looking for someone.” Not the same someone, not anymore. She’s solved the case, but not the mystery – the only one worth solving. The answers lay beneath the stone, and up in the vortexual light. 

“Well, there’s only me here. Take your pick.” 

“That’s what the other one said.”

When the woman speaks again, she looks away, unable to meet the intruders eyes. The feeling is achingly familiar. “I’m sorry I never came back for you. To be perfectly honest, I was afraid of what I might find.” 

“It’s alright,” the intruder assures her. The pat on the back, the voluntary slip. She can’t remember what it is that the woman is apologising for. Her mind is far too muddled, thoughts and memories dancing circles around themselves. Dimly, she feels blood under her nails, the lightning snap of missile fire in her hair. Ash in her lungs. 

“It isn’t. Not really. I should have come back. Finished the job myself, if I had to. It’s too late now, of course,” she sighs. “Loose ends left hanging… I’m trying to be better, these days. I’ve got more rules.” She grimaces, “as you can tell, it hasn’t gone so well.” 

“As long as you’re trying,” the intruder says, encouraging. She feels like she should, even though she doesn’t understand. “Trying to be good, isn’t that the point?”

“Clara, my Clara,” she murmurs, voice raspy and thin. “I’m not nearly so kind.” 

The intruder blinks, and her companion is gone. She is alone with the light, and the white stone, and the grass. She can feel the darkness breathing beneath her. Pressing her eyes shut, she searches for it, feet upon the black ice, prodding, looking for a pressure point from which the ground might crack. 

She opens her eyes, and the planet is gone. A circular stone platform floating in a purple, nebulous dark. The tower stands, its light raging, reflected in the ground as if in a glassy pool. It licks and spits and reaches, gripping at her spine, her mind. _Listen,_ it seems to instruct. A whine in the air, a sparkle, a flicker of unending gold. She wonders, if she falls from this platform and into the light, will she ever stop? Is there another surface waiting to break her fall, more faces, another outcrop from which to fall. A circle, perhaps. One universe to the next to the next, flaring and dying as swift as spring flowers. 

Across the light, the torn fabric between worlds, a leaf blows. Boundless, weightless. She follows it. 

She falls. The violet waves sting, hot as bladepoints pressed upon her skin, molten metal shards, scraping. Eating. Beyond, silence such as she has never known. Void, though whether it is truly empty, or simply incomprehensible, incompatible with her senses, she doesn’t know. The darkness seems to stretch on forever, thick as tar, enveloping, moulding. 

There are things in the dark, and the things _are_ the dark. 

They dance; motes of gold, swirls of pure power. Stelliferous energy humming voltaic in the blackness. They coat her cells, mirroring, learning, growing. A hive, a race, a _life_. 

It doesn’t speak to her. It doesn’t yet know how, but a piece leaks through, from one universe to another. A sliver.

_An echo._

As she fades, she feels the weight of a silver disk in her hands, and the muscles in her fingers jolt as the little machine begins to burn. An old instinct, hard-wired, carried over from the dawn of her species. 

The neuroblock drops to the floor with a clang and a hiss, smoke wafting from sparks of electric flame. Oswin falls back onto her elbows, the white light of the room searing painfully into her eyes, a far cry from the unending dark. She looks up at the ceiling, where a ripple of purple energy stains her vision, an auroral sunspot. Exhausted, she lies back, allowing the calming aura of the zero room to coat her frozen old bones. She struggles against the tide, the gravitational pull of the inferno, trying to pull her back to the tomb that awaits her. The shock of sensation was enough to bring her back to reality, but fate is persistent. 

Fortunately, she won’t have to hold on for much longer. Around her, the TARDIS jolts and shudders, its engines crying out in protest. Returning to an impossible set of coordinates, sequestered outside the material universe. 

Oswin gets to her feet, leaving the fried neuroblock on the floor. Rage courses through her veins where the blood has long since stopped. 

She goes to confront the boy who will become the Doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep referencing stuff in this chapter from the modern prometheus, which is dumb as hell because it's on hiatus and I haven't published most of it anyway so literally... who are these references for? Just me I guess.


	5. And

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An argument, a prophecy, and a confrontation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said the chapter 3 echo Clara section was going to be the longest, and then the next one was longer? Yeah. this one is even longer.

**Orphan 394, 25946 ATW**

Os has been waiting for this day all her life. 

All her life has only lasted nineteen months, which isn’t terribly long to wait in the grand scheme of things. 

Her memories stretch back nearly twenty-six years, but there is a certain quality to those memories – the false memories, spun from space-time to cover up a cosmic anomaly. They are shallow and insubstantial. Expend any great effort in focussing upon their details and they begin to fall apart. Like fog on glass, they wipe away, and there is nothing but night beyond the glazing. Nothing but impersonal facts to pluck from an unlived past if asked.

There is a clear divide between the jumbled clarity of her new memories, with their sights and scents and clear-cut faces, and the illusions. Os would never have discovered their falsity if she hadn’t been forced to confront it. Despite the existential discomfort the truth causes her, Os is glad that she did. The fate of many galaxies may well come to depend on it.

Around her, the ship rattles, and Os grits her teeth. A small, chrome-interiored transport vessel rockets through the stratosphere, high above the machine swarms that snap up at the sky like rabid dogs upon the surface world. Opposite Os, strapped into her moulded plastic seat with a personally-attuned air field surrounding her, Morgan is asleep. A frown knots her angular features, and she mumbles something senseless beyond the air shield. Os really did try her best to dissuade her from coming. 

In the year 25944 ATW, Os popped into existence on the human colony of the terraformed and revitalised planet designated Orphan 394. The planet’s true name has been lost to time. Millions of years ago, its dense populace were engaged in a ruthless nuclear conflict that concluded, with inarguable finality, in the utter decimation of the surface world. A poisoned atmosphere, diverse biomes bombed to identical fields of hot, brown ruin. Within a few centuries, there were no survivors. The lifecycle of a nuclear war began, as it has upon many other worlds similarly doomed by the hand of its dominant species, with a blighting pall of acerbic ash, ushering in a long, grey, toxic winter. The smog cleared to beckon blistering heat, and fires raged across oil-slicked, black soil. Poisoned ocean waves crashed against the eroded cliffs, their bergs dotted with ragged tarps and tents of the primitive mutant civilisations that lived and died in the gloaming. Then, the slow cooling, the return to equilibrium; the air slowly cleaning itself and returning to a breathable state by process of a long, irradiated spring. Centuries after, Os’ crew landed, and began the slow process of revitalising the healing world. 

They are called Orphan planets, as Os was taught in a childhood education facility that she never attended, because they were abandoned by their inhabitants, or rendered devoid of life, by some natural or engineered calamity. Sometimes, it was war, or the degradation of the planet’s magnetic field, a meteor strike, a solar storm, a plague, a fading of the atmosphere or a spike in global temperatures. There are so many ways for a world to end before it can reach intergalactic status, and as such there are many refugees in the universe, left in want of a home. In this post-Time War age, (many still believe that the war was a true event, and scholars continue to argue the possibility) the universe is more like a scattered conglomeration of refugees than a united empire. As such, companies such as Revivify have been invested in by many an intergalactic corporate holding in order to fill the flourishing market demand. So many planets are dead or empty or populated only by monstrous pests. The purpose of Os’ colony is to lay the foundations for the civilisation to come, according to the product specifications of their client. 

The terraforming process is entirely automated; trained on an exhaustive series of simulations to adapt its reasoning to handling different biomes and atmospheric conditions. Send the drones down and in a few decades they will have assessed the planet’s precise molecular structures, self-replicated, and re-terraformed the planet to suit whichever species has bid upon it as their new home. Once all threats have been eradicated from the planet – crops planted, species introduced, atmosphere optimised for health and vitality – the colony will move on to prepare the next world. It is a service that they provide, at Revivify, though even their overseeing roles are likely to be automated soon enough, as most things are. As of now it is a decent form of the dwindling reality of human employment. It isn’t a popular occupation for those with friends and family and a home planet they enjoy residing upon. Generally, it is a lifetime commitment, and between the long journeys spent in cryostasis, and the time dilation experienced through the gravitational fluctuations of hyperspace travel, there is no guarantee that any of the colonists would have a family to return to upon retirement. For Os, it wasn’t a difficult decision to make.

She always wanted to see the universe. 

Nineteen months, she often has to remind herself. That is what always means, to her. 

The colony has been posted on Orphan 394 for three years, and though all her crewmates remember Os being present on the journey over from Revivify HQ, her absence is easily provable. There’s too few stasis pods on the vessel they arrived in, too few supply packs, and their overseers do not make errors. One day, Os didn’t exist, and then she did. 

Although she can’t explain how, she knows why. Os came into existence for this day, this one day. Something is waiting for her on the other side of the planet. If she doesn’t go to it, it will come to her, and by then it will be too late. 

Three of crewmates accompany her on her fated journey, and each one of them agreed to do so knowing that there will be no return trip. 

Morgan has woken up, and Os greets her with a mock-salute. In response, Morgan pokes out her tongue. They can’t hear one another through the artificial air pockets that surround them, and they’re cheaper for command than having to install pressure actualisation systems on the ship itself. Where they’re going, the air shields will offer little shielding against the rotting atmosphere. 

Os activates the comms unit on the collar of her suit.

Another comms device is affixed to her ear, whereupon she would, if she were to unmute it, be greeted by two insufferable scholars that, in her opinion, seem far too keen to study her demise. 

“How’s the air?” Os asks Morgan through her suit-collar microphone.

“Tastes like burnt toast,” she grumbles.

Os shrugs. “HQ’s about to earn their biggest payout in years from this media deal. Maybe they can get them flavoured or something.”

“They’ll only get paid if we win. Otherwise the galaxy’s going to end, remember?” Through the shifting surface of Morgan’s pale air shield, she smiles. Her almond-shaped black eyes betray fear, beneath her mischief. Os should have stopped her from coming, though it would likely have involved locking her in her sleeping pod. 

“What do you think, Professor,” Os says, unmuting her earpiece. They can hear everything she says regardless – in fact, they can measure everything from her brainwaves to the fluctuation of her blood pressure. It is jacked into her brain stem, her cornea, even her sinuses. They will sense everything that she does, down to the smallest alterations in her brain chemistry.

“How much will the Satellite Cities pay for the rights to this conversation?” Os asks. The earpiece is of much higher quality than the suit’s systems, meant for long range communication. It was fabricated in the colony base’s matter recycler according to a design sent from the scholars themselves.

“Upwards of a billion credits, Oswald,” says Professor Moore in a jovial tone. “You and your friends will be very famous indeed.” Although she has never seen his face, Os imagines a round-faced man, probably dressed in tweed, with bright eyes and red cheeks.

“Very dead, though.”

“Yes, well,” the Professor mumbles. “That is the unfortunate price, it would seem.” 

Malfunctioning of the automated terraforming system is unheard of. Actually, it’s impossible, given the extreme cryptographic security protecting each unit from outside interference. 

Nine days ago the colony base was alerted to a severing in the chain of command, and they discovered that the units on the far side of the planet were no longer responding to orders. Their rates of self-replication quickly reached a precipitous new peak. At first, the colony technicians thought it was some sort of freak accident – the hive of mechanical minds now serving their own parameters in spontaneous discovery of will – and they were continuing to grow and perfect the environment beyond the quality paid for by Revivify’s clients. This optimistic theory quickly fell through when they realised that the machines were not only replicating, but improving themselves, emerging from caldrouns deep beneath the soil re-engineered, hostile, and working ruthlessly to strip the planet’s biosphere to the barren, desolate rock it once was. This behaviour was antithetical to the system’s most basic tenants of programming, and so they were forced to conclude that the swarm had been hijacked by some external, malicious intelligence. 

Colony operations were suspended, and every available resource expended in discovering what the intelligence was, and where it came from. Impossibly, they found that it wasn’t some leftover war machine gone rogue, or a virus engineered by their competitors, but a being of intangible consciousness. It was something beyond their understanding, whose origins were untraceable, as if it had simply evaporated into existence one day and began slaving the network of terraforming machines to its will. 

In all projected simulations, the swarm will continue to fabricate new units and burrow through the earth, building factories, improving themselves until they consume the reconstituted biomass of the entire planet. If the malicious intelligence were to gain access to the colonist’s ships, and their systems connected to the network of mass-produced terraforming systems present on countless colony planets throughout the surrounding galaxies, it could infect them too. Every one of those planets would be consumed from the inside out. Worse, if the intelligence were to gain access to their transportation systems it could begin infecting new worlds, growing metal hatcheries mycelic beneath their soils, waiting to consume the surface and its people. The end of life in the galaxy, perhaps in all galaxies. 

This is what Os must face, by virtue of her spontaneous creation. The transport ship tracks a signal that radiates from the source of the disturbance, interfering with the terraforming units planetwide, encroaching slowly like a plague across its surface. Tracing the origins of that signal, Os would be unsurprised to find that it had begun nineteen months ago too, and had gone undetected until it became impossible to ignore. 

It was too late to send reinforcements, too late to attempt escape. If even a single nanobot were to stow away in the molecular structure of their ship, connected to the network now hijacked by the viral intelligence, all would be lost. All communications with Revivify were severed, and the colony went dark. All prepared, in the chromic halls and burgeoning hydroponic fields, for death. 

Despite their veritable death sentence, many of the colonists continued to attempt to understand the force that was hijacking the terraforming system. As a branch of the intergalactic corporate alliance, their base has a copy of the vast database of the surrounding galaxies – historical and cultural and scientific information collected over millions of years by millions of worlds.

What began as a morbid theory, a joke thrown about nervously between friends, became increasingly more likely. Perhaps the intelligence was _the_ Intelligence, from the chilling bedtime stories and worldly myths. Perhaps they were doing battle against a legend. Theory became accepted fact when they discovered they had been living alongside one for nearly two years. 

Strange, that none of them had made the connection between the legendary hero, and the snarky operations assistant that had, inexplicably, appeared among them. 

The Intelligence has appeared throughout history, flaring up quick as a spark of flame, only to be extinguished. Since the beginning of the universe, the same pattern, the same being, appearing and disappearing. From the earliest of recorded histories, documented by archeologists studying long-lost civilisations, artifacts have been discovered. A slab etched with runes telling the story of a dark spirit banished by a young woman in an act of self sacrifice. A cave painting found near-perfectly preserved from light and wind of a sprawling dark mass faced off by a small, lone figure. 

Throughout history, across worlds, that is how the story goes. The monster and the girl. On some planets, they were popular legends, tellings of the story slightly altered, but always in essence the same. It was thought to be a cultural phenomenon, until the advanced age of the Intergalactic Alliance, where all was recorded and shared across countless systems. Just six hundred years ago there was a woman, an intern working for the Board of Directors, who stopped the invasion of the Alliance by throwing the Intelligence, in augmented human form, from the airlock and into the neutron star powering the ring city. Her face is on a plaque in the Hall of Adjudication. 

From myth to wive’s tale to conspiracy theory to undisputed fact, it grew. Now there are entire academic studies concerned with the phenomenon.

When her colleagues discovered who Os was, they opened an encrypted communication channel with Revivify HQ, who immediately passed the information onto the necessary academic bodies. Her interaction with the Intelligence will be studied with great interest, and presumably sold to the highest bidding broadcast channel to feature in an exclusive media event. 

On her way to her death, Os studies legends. She downloaded as many records as she could before they departed for the home the Intelligence has made for itself, and the enthusiastic academics have supplied their own bodies of work with near-reverential insistence. 

Her favourite variation so far is that of the Shivanian Empress and her Royal Protector, who defended the temple of Azaroth fifteen thousand years ago. An evil force waking stone creatures from the earth, and possessing members of the aristocracy in order to gain control of the empire and its holdings across the galaxy. The Protector fought her way with sword and staser through the ancient temple and its waking tombs, cutting down the intelligence’s avatars, and pierced its heart of evil. She broke its spell at the cost of her life, and the Protector died bravely, with sword in hand, and was remembered in song and legend as a saint of courage and chivalry. As for Os, she doesn’t have a sword. She can’t throw a punch, and even if she could, it’s not as if she can put up her fists and fight a sentient terraforming system. She isn’t a computer scientist or an engineer, and has no understanding of the mechanics of the terraforming system, let alone how to purge a malicious force from its core. 

“But that is the extraordinary thing, Miss Oswald,” says Professor Moore, when she voices this concern. He is ecstatic to be speaking to her, as he has made clear many times throughout their brief correspondence – first back at the colony base and now on their planet-wide voyage. He reminds her of an excitable child, or an avid fan meeting an elusive idol. “There is no conceivable pattern between each incursion, yet the outcome is always the same. There is, I believe, some hidden power guiding your actions, such that failure is quite impossible. As such, the pattern has persisted for billions of years.” 

He has explained this to her before, but it hasn’t done much to quell her nerves. What if the cycle ends with her? What if, inconceivably, she does fail, and she is the one to break her legacy, and undo the sacrifice of those who came before her?

“And you would call that power destiny, I suppose,” sneers the voice of Doctor Sokolov, who, it appears, has returned to the communication line. Conflict is sure to follow. Moore and Sokolov are both experts in their extremely narrow field, the intersection between science and legend, history and philosophy. Naturally, they are rivals, keepers of antithetical points of view. 

Os imagines that Sokolov is tall and thin, though only to keep a sense of comedic contrast between the two scholars. She also imagines that Sokolov is younger than Moore, to prop up the image of a disenchanted former student striking out to follow his own newfangled ideas. She quite enjoys the narrative she has constructed around them, pieced together from scattered facts glued together with fiction. It takes her mind off her inevitable and fast approaching death. 

“And I suppose you would call it coincidence?” replies Moore, equally snide. 

“A temporal anomaly, the details of which can be found in my paper –”

“Which I found to be an insubstantial, unsupported bore.”

“Either way,” Os cuts across the beginnings of another argument, and her fellow passengers, unable to hear her private, academic soap opera, look over her with idle curiosity. “I’ve got this in the bag, yeah? Just have to waltz up there and improvise.” 

“Precisely!” exclaims Moore.

“Not at all,” says Sokolov. 

“Great,” Os sighs, she flashes Morgan an easy smile and tunes into the ship’s shared communication channel. “Not to worry,” she points at her earpiece. “Just working on a game plan.” She was hoping to get a laugh or two out of that, maybe a chuckle. They’re all about to die, after all. She’s been trying to build up a Dadaistic atmosphere, but has been finding it difficult to summon the energy. 

On her right, Yu leans forwards and gives her a double thumbs-up. “Don’t worry Os,” his skinny face grins. There is a slight delay between the movement of his lips and the sound of his voice crackling tinnily through her speaker. “Total faith in you.”

She frowns. “I made the coffee machine explode by jamming it and apparently that’s not even possible. I’m not exactly a technological whizz.”

“Well then, whatever you did to the coffee machine, do that to the Intelligence, and it’ll all work out,” Yu says brightly. 

“Right, yeah,” Os says breathlessly. “Okay.” Across the channel, a loud snore crackles, low and whining across the static connection. Os winces.

“How can he be asleep at a time like this?” Morgan says disparagingly. Sure enough, their captain, Joplin, is dozing in his burnt-toast bulb of air. 

“Mute him,” Yu cries. With a fond smile, Os tunes out of the ship’s communication channel.

Joplin, Yu, and Morgan. They are the experts, the engineers – those who understand the inner mechanics of the terraforming system. They are making an effort to be kind now that their lives are about to end, for which she is grateful, but ever since the truth of her nature came to light, her colleagues began to treat her differently. Many of those that she once considered friends are distant now, walking on eggshells around a heroine of legend. 

Os glances at the monitor on the opposite wall, a small rectangular screen positioned above the seats. One-thousand three hundred rels until arrival. That’s ages away – what if she gets bored?

“I think I’m probably going to regret this,” Os sighs into her microphone, “but how do you two think this all began?”

“Well,” says Moore, and she can hear the excitement in his tone.

“Finally, you ask,” says Sokolov, simultaneously, and just as eager. She imagines him straightening the lapels of a crisp, charcoal grey suit. The regret has already begun to set in. 

“One at a time,” she says sternly. “I’d like to know what I am, and what I’m facing.”

“Quite right,” agrees Moore, cutting across the beginnings of Sokolov’s introduction. She can practically hear the scowl on Sokolov’s face. 

Moore clears his throat. “It is my belief – my educated, extensively researched and widely supported belief – that the creature – the intelligence, the beast, the monster, as legend names it –” bumbles Moore, his voice preening and self-important. Os imagines a puffed-up chest beneath a tweed waistcoat, perhaps a smoking mechanical cigar in one pudgy hand. “– is a being of consciousness that was formed outside the universe.”

“An impossibility.” Sokolov attempts to pass off this interjection as a highly-detailed cough. 

She can imagine Moore’s nostrils flaring, a hiss escaping beneath his moustached lip before he presses on. “It is, as such, incongruent with our own reality, our unique set of laws which, given our limited frame of reference, may as well be randomised – an accidental harmony that, in its resonance, allows life and liberty to exist. As such, a being from beyond must learn, must shape itself into one that fits upon this plane.”

“Right,” Os murmurs, hoping that they might be arriving at a point fairly soon. 

“This is where its adaptability comes from – its unexplained ability to hijack so many forms of technology regardless of its base configurations. It is a master of adaptation, of disguise, of mirroring. It is a mirror to all creation, I believe. A great, festering sponge of evil.”

“Evil because it feels like it or evil because that’s what it found?” Os asks. 

“Ah,” Moore growls, “that is the question, is it not? But we divert toward the murky waters of philosophy.” He clears his throat. “Imagine a creature such as that, split apart, fractured across time. Imagine it is unable to parse time linearly, as we do, because it is so profoundly different.” 

“Imagining it, yeah.”

“Have you heard of the Eternals?”

In her earpiece, Sokolov scoffs. 

“Of course,” Os tells Moore. “Stories, bedtime stories. Immortal guardians and tricksters and observers.” She remembers her mother whispering them to her at her bedside beneath the purplish glow of the seven moons – only, she never had a mother. She never heard those stories. They are common knowledge, and so, the cosmos deigned to give them to her. “You think that’s what this Intelligence is?”

“I think it is an unignorable coincidence that these tales persist with such insoluble gusto across all eras, all species.”

“They say that stories are where memories go when they’re forgotten,” Os adds, in a sage tone. She can’t quite remember who told her that. Perhaps the mother that never was. 

“Precisely,” Moore agrees. 

“So, what does that make me, in this widely supported theory of yours?”

“Well, this is where we must disembark from our sturdy vessel, Miss Oswald. Jump overboard, if you will, and brave the icy waters of speculation.”

“And your previous drivel was firmly upon the deck of cemented fact, was it Moore?” Sokolov drawls. 

“It stands to reason –”

“Reason? Bah!”

“– that you are an entity of a similar sort, perhaps trapped in human form.” Moore presses on, and Os imagines a thick, furrowed brow. “There are records of such technology – a replica exists in my university, infact – of a device which could alter biological material and encrypt the minds of higher beings into a more simplistic form – think of it as folding something very large into a small space, compressing it.”

“But I’m… scattered across time, I keep popping up like Cybermen. How’d you explain that?”

“How indeed, Professor,” Sokolov sneers. 

“I believe that you could be some fractal of the intelligence, sequestered, dragged along on its nonlinear journey. Perhaps you are one entity, split in two.”

“How very romantic.”

“Well it would explain the balance that comes of their meeting,” Moore blusters defensively. “The cosmic cancellation, when the two are united. Observing the atmospheric and electromagnetic fluctuations recorded during these historic occurrences – through the preserved soil, fossilised artifacts, the simulated gravitational conditions – they all point to a climactic building of cosmic energies, quelled only by the perceived death of the both parties.”

“The evidence is clear, yes, but it does not point to some game of the Eternals. They are creatures of legend, Moore.”

“A living legend stands before you – well, speaks to you through an earpiece – and you wish to debate the line between real and fancy?”

“Alright, Professor Moore, you’ve made your case,” Os says diplomatically. “Sokolov?”

“Miss Oswald, I am partial to an explanation that is far less divine.” She feels like an investor faced with rivalling business pitches. “It is an accident, a temporal glitch. Some atrocity left over from the Time War, like scar tissue, red and raw.”

“Says the one who would lecture me about believing in legend,” Moore adds ruefully. 

“So you think the Time War really happened then?” Os asks. She isn’t skeptical. It’s hard to be skeptical when one is the subject of impossibility. So far, she has taken each new absurdity numbly in her stride. 

“Of course it really happened,” Sokolov berates. 

“And the Time Lords, they existed too?” Asks Os. 

“Yes, an empire that controlled all of space and time, only to nearly destroy the entirety of reality in a catastrophic war that, at its height, disappeared completely. All its smoking battlegrounds, its ongoing skirmishes, its colony planets and offworld platoons. Every inch of the universe touched by its battlefire was wiped from existence in one fell swoop.”

“Sounds a bit convenient,” Os reasons.

“Yes, and impossible,” Moore adds. 

“And yet the evidence persists that the war still rages on beyond the fabric of time and space, like scratching behind the walls of the universe.”

Os imagines Moore rolling his eyes. “And now who employs a childish metaphor?”

“It is known that the Time Lords employed weapons of temporal devastation that could tear through one’s timeline – his entire lived life – and cannibalise it. Beings were fractured, entire races decimated, planets never born but still screaming through the potentiality. Such a race, with such power, is the only thing that can explain the rippling legend of Miss Oswald and the Great Intelligence. A stalemate, a never ending battle between two forces. A ripe scar, a brane of stringent nonsense left residual upon the universal canvas after the war imploded, swallowed itself whole, and evaporated into the ether.” 

Softly, on the other line, Moore chuckles. 

“Professor Moore,” Os offers in an impatient tone. A teacherly tone, as if reprimanding an insolent student stifling laughter at the back of the classroom. “You seem to have a different point of view.”

“To that, Miss Oswald, I would ask you this. What year is it?”

With difficulty, she suppresses a sigh. “Twenty-five, nine-hundred and forty six.”

“And,” she can hear his raised brow and his expectant, smug grin. 

“ATW. After Time War.”

“Precisely. Now tell me, do you remember the tales of the human motherworld, Earth? They marked a fissure in history with the fictional death of a religious figurehead that may or may not have really existed. There is no significance to the day outside of that which belief affords it. The same can be said of our modern-day dating system, centred upon a great war of legend. The end of the great Time War, like the crucifiction, is just a tale that marks the years, embedded so heavily into the public consciousness that the convention simply stuck.” 

“Fatally, Moore, you ignore the evidence. I documented it well in my early years of study –”

“And tried so ardently to twist the Intelligence mythos to fit your previously abandoned theory.”

“Fissures and fluxuations in space-time culminating around a singular point of resonance – beyond which rages an eternal war –”

“Stories, my good man –”

“And yet you believe that the Eternals are real as you and I,” sneers Sokolov. 

“Beings from beyond the universe, that is simply the name we gave to the diverse mass, like cosmic curry –”

“But the Time Lords are out of the question –”

“A cautionary tale to remind us of the importance of unity, for no one empire to rise in greed above the rest!”

“You are a fool to dismiss what is evident, Moore –”

“Me, a fool – no, it is _you –_ ”

With a sigh, Os mutes her earpiece. She leans her head back against the rattling, hard-cushioned seat behind her, shuts her eyes, and counts to ten. Once she reaches ten, she presses on to twenty and, upon that, decides to make it a round one hundred. 

Upon reaching the arbitrary point, she finds her nerves in no way sated. At least her mind feels clearer, more focused. It doesn’t matter why – most people spend their whole (albeit much longer) lives debating the why of it all. Her why matters no more than the rest of them. At least she has a clear path ahead. 

Ancient soldier or fractured eternal being, she has a planet to save. 

Around her, Morgan and Yu are engaged in a conversation Os cannot hear. Every minute or so, one of them glances her way, and she pretends not to see. Talking about her, no doubt, about how strange all of this is. About how they always knew, deep down, that there was something wrong with Os. Maybe they’re only saying that her hair looks nice today, and that the silver eyeliner was a good choice, for her final day. 

The ship shudders as it lands, and the pristine white quality of the lights flicker to a dim, clay grey. In silent monotony, the crew unstrap their seatbelts and file, in their bespoke suit-bound air-pockets, through the narrow hold to take their helmets. The atmosphere on this side of the planet is no longer breathable, with the wildlife that would regularly filter and oxygenate the air long since devoured by the machines that now swarm the brown wastes. Their air shields are too weak to protect against the airless radiation outside, like bread in the rain they would dampen and wash away. The helmet visors are tinted blue, and slathers the scene in ocean hues. 

Grounded, the ship surveys the surrounding atmosphere, purging the systems inside of any intelligent traces that might be picked up by the swarm before the shields can be lowered, and the doors opened. Os waits, watching the percentage of scan completion creep up in red, neon text. Twelve percent. 

Os jumps as a hand closes upon her shoulder; grey gloved with soft, carbon-based plastics, corrugated and flexible and impenetrable. It is made to withstand the harshest of atmospheric conditions and, hopefully, whatever machines Os’ cosmic adversary may throw at them. 

“How are you feeling?” Morgan asks. Os looks up at her, the dull outline of her sharp features visible through her sealed visor. 

“Peachy,” says Os, with a lopsided grin. 

“Yeah, well, you’ve always been a bit of an idiot.” Thirty percent. 

“I’ve only been an idiot for five-hundred and seventy-eight days, thank you very much.” Os tries not to wallow in the strange sadness of that truth. It’s still a lot of days. More than enough for Morgan to be her very real friend. Her very real more-than-friend, actually, but it only hurts to dwell on that. “I wish you would have stayed back at base,” Os says. 

“You couldn’t have stopped me if you tried, Oswald.” Their stubbornness, when turned against one another, is perpetual. They were thinking of settling on this planet, once the terraforming process was done – make it a permanent home. The pale green skies remind Morgan of her motherworld. “And if they do make this into a movie, there had better be a very dramatic argument. Tears, romantic tension, the sort of scene they mass-produce in the Satellite City soaps.” Morgan grins. Fifty-eight percent. 

“Alright Os,” says their appointed, now awake captain, Joplin. He claps her on the back a little too hard, and Os lurches forward with a start. 

“Those academic nuts tell you anything useful,” asks Yu with a snide grin Os can hear without seeing it through his visor. 

“Not particularly,” she admits. Reminded of their presence, Os turns up her earpiece once more. There is a moment of staticised silence before Sokolov’s voice crackles over the channel. 

“Miss Oswald,” he says sombrely. “I am deeply sorry for the earlier behaviour of myself and my _colleague_.” His bitter tone is fuel enough to start another argument. It doesn’t seem to take much with these two. 

Moore restrains himself. “Yes, my sincerest apologies. We are making this task no easier for you, I know.” Seventy-two percent. 

“Well we’ve arrived now, time for you two to get studying. Pay close attention,” her teacherly tone has returned. “Don’t let this go to waste.” 

“Of course not,” Sokolov says gravely. Moore hums his agreement. 

The front hatch unseals with a hiss and a rush of steaming air. It lowers and settles as a ramp upon the wastes to reveal an acid-yellow sky, tinged sickly green through their visors. The air is choked with black dust, swirling in belts of soot and settling in the crevices of the dark, cragged rocks that stretch endlessly to the sulphur horizon. As Os steps out onto the surface of the dying world, she feels the soil ripple beneath her. The pebbles skitter and chatter and squeak. Not pebbles at all, but a swarm of tiny machines, metal coated mercuric over beetle-backs, their wire-thin appendages propelling them in an undulating mass across the stone. Behind her, she hears Yu yelp despite the helmet that substantially muffles his speech. 

“Nasty buggers,” Joplin mutters, his voice crackling through her suit’s comms unit. The insect-like bots are ordinarily churned out by the terraforming system as molecular fabricators, made to build the intricate structures of vegetation and wildlife in all its tetrahedral glory, but Os has never seen so many concentrated in one place, nor does she remember their legs being pronged and sharp. 

“They aren’t attacking,” Morgan observes. The bots scatter from the path of their heavy, grey boots as if afraid. 

The rusted wreckage of an old war litters the brown landscape, reaching with dark, jagged hands toward the blistering sun. The atmosphere here is thin, and radiation teems in every molecule, hungry. There are blackened tanks and shelled-out warheads – piles of junk suffused into a glassy metal mass in the heat of the firestorms that raged centuries past. The tiny robots congeal in a mass of spitting, chinking metal, folding away like a rolling carpet to reveal a clear path ahead. 

“Looks like it’s this way,” Os mutters wryly into her helmet comms unit. “I’ll lead.”

“Not a chance. I’m the captain, I’ll go first.” Joplin states, and from his stubborn, noble tone Os knows she shouldn’t argue. Eternal being/ancient soldier or not, she is under his command until the soon-approaching end. 

He steps past Os, and before she can continue after him, Morgan passes her too, resting a hand on his shoulder for a wonderful moment before pressing on along the dead-earth path. Os slots in behind her. There is only room for them to walk in a single-file along the path, and she has a feeling that the Intelligence would prefer they stick to it. It’s like another of the old bedtime stories she never heard; stick to the path in the Black Forest, or you will be tempted by the green creatures of bark and damp soil that lurk amongst the groves. That one might be a memory. 

The path leads to the heart of the battleground, where the cooled molten ruin of weapons and machines and armored corpses alike are piled high. Old turrets and fighter-jet wings and missile points stand erect at its peak like totemic monuments, grazing the low-swirling, acrid fog that sifts across the landscape. Os has seen the observation pictures, captured by satellite before they landed on Orphan 394 (or, she remembers seeing them, as do the others, though her recollections are fabricated). All across the globe, this world was well on the way to revitalisation. Blue prairies and towering pines, snow-capped mountain ranges, temperate jungles – a varied biome catering towards all prospective life that had placed its trust (and enormous sums of credits) in Revivify. In just a few months, it has all been stripped away, and the machine’s hunger will continue to exponentiate until nothing is left, and this entire planet is an abandoned, irradiated battlefield once more. 

At the foot of the metal mountain, there is an opening; an alcove in the surface. There rests a looming panel of machinery, its sections rusted and its screen cracked. A remnant of an old war machine. 

“Incredible,” murmurs Sokolov, in Os’ ear, “the shell of a strategic computer. An artificial intelligence tasked with simulating and forecasting all possible outcomes of conflict.” Os has heard of similar systems employed in far larger conflicts, the sort of machine that might decide to decimate an entire star system for the smallest strategic advantage. 

Behind them sounds a grind of metal on metal, the hollow chime of scraping shells as the beetle-like machines reform into a uniform mass over the earth. So much for sticking to the path. Their ship, shielded and shut down, would be difficult to find in the featureless waste, but that isn’t a problem. It isn’t as if they will be going back. 

Os steps forward, breaking their single-file line, and reaches out towards the old machine. “Morgan,” she asks absently, brushing a thick layer of dust off one of the button panels. The plastic digits have melted together into a bulbous puddle, useless. “What do you think of this?” As a representative of the HQ engineering sector, Morgan knows better than anyone about the technological flexibility of their devices. “Could the core of the terraforming system have been hijacked from here? Looks pretty busted up.” Tentatively, she taps the screen with a heavily-padded finger. “Morgan?” Os turns and sees that her crew still stand idle just a few feet away, looking forward at the mound of metal. Fear grips her gut and pulls, and it’s as if her intestines are being stretched out, pulled taught; a spring elongated, set to coil with a snap. Stepping towards them, she sees a flash of movement beneath their visors; dark, rippling movement. A crackle of static in her helmet, and the channel is flooded by the chattering of tiny machines, scrapping, clanking flint-strikes rustling in her ears like laughter, like giggling. With a cry of alarm, she shuts off her communicator and rushes over to Morgan. Through the blue of her visor, she sees the tiny fabricator machines swarming where her flesh once was, beetles streaming in torrents through the eye-sockets and shocked-open jaw of a black, flesh-stained skull. Behind the blue, it reminds Os of a tempesting sea. 

“Morgan!” she cries, reaching up to grip her shoulders. She can feel the machine’s movement beneath the layers of the suit, vibrating, like muscles writhing beneath grey, plastic skin. 

“How curious – Moore, are you receiving these readings.”

“Clear as day, Sokolov. Extraordinary.

“Yes, extraordinary,” Os spits, in grief and anger, “they’re all dead.” She takes a deep breath and begins to count again; only to ten this time. She isn’t sure she has time for a full one hundred-level detox. This was always how it was going to end, she reminds herself, but this is too soon. Too soon to be left alone. They didn’t even have a chance to put their expertise to use. There was no point in them coming, none at all, and she should have fought harder to stop them – hijacked a colony transporter and mader her own way. She should have had the courage to face this alone, as she is destined to, as she was _made_ to. 

“I am sorry, Miss Oswald,” Moore says gravely. Well, not entirely alone. She’s got two idiots in her ear. 

Her crewmates still stand, motionless apart from the slight wavering of their suit material from the motion of the machines beneath. 

“They strip the bone bare with such speed,” Sokolov remarks, as Os observes the machine’s handiwork. “It’s as if they have evolved themselves for the sole purpose of devouring and transforming the chemical energies of human flesh.”

“Well I suspect they have, Doctor Sokolov,” replies Moore. 

“Seems woefully inefficient.”

“We’re not dealing with a terraforming protocol gone rogue,” Os reminds them, and herself. It was one of the first clues they had found to support their morbid, impossible theory. What they face is not a glitch, but a determined force. A force that knows how to incite fear, and perhaps derives joy from it. 

“We’re dealing with something sadistic,” Os continues. “Efficiency is an afterthought to terror.” 

“Right you are,” Moore agrees, and Os can’t help but notice his excitement. 

“Alright then,” Os shouts, letting her voice ring through the coral pores of festering rust, and the caves of dead machines. “I’m here, let’s get this over with.” 

When it speaks, its voice comes from the machine buried in the side of the mountain, and from the muted comms unit in her helmet, and from inside her head. “Cockroach!” it cries, in a manner almost fond, beneath its haunting pulse. “How long it has been.”

“Ah yes,” Moore mutters, “a detail I have often heard, it remembers her though she is unable to remember it.”

Os hushes him, and then, unsure of where to look, she turns her gaze up to address the screen that once served as a monitor for the artificial intelligence that once orchestrated the end of this world. “Hello mate,” she crows, waving lazily at the machine. “Been keeping well.” 

“Busy, at the very least. The warm weather is a nice change.”

“The radiation good for the circuits?” 

Its tone crepitates in a thin whistle that might be a laugh. “I don’t suppose you remember our time in Serbia – oh, it was a very, _very_ close thing. I thought perhaps I’d finally cracked it. Alas, there it goes.” In her bones, she feels a sigh. “Just moments ago, you sealed my fate, though the impact blast will send you flying from the cliff’s edge, falling through the bitter cold and – there.” The rusted mountain grins. “You’ve been impaled on a stalagmite.” 

Os is imagining it, surely, but she feels a sliver of ice drive between her ribs, snapping them as easily as branches in the path of an oncoming car. “I’m running out of opportunities, I fear,” the air laments. “Last time we met I said that I had something to tell you. You may ask – but how is that so? All these events unfold simultaneously, across concurrent echoing fractals of you and I. How can it be that one precedes another?” 

Through her earpiece, Moore is breathing very heavily. “I wasn’t going to ask that, funnily enough,” Os tells the Intelligence, feigning disinterest. 

“No, but your friends were. Isn’t that right?”

“He knows we’re listening,” Moore whispers, unhelpfully. 

The Intelligence continues in a smug tone – to the extent that the whistle of air through rust and the clatter of tiny machines inside spacesuited skeletons can be smug. “Professors, you are so close to being right, and yet so very far. You both have pieces of the puzzle, if only you could slot them together. You might finally solve this elusive mystery.” Os can almost hear their jaws drop. 

“Alright then,” Os claps her gloved hands together with a dull smack. “I’ll ask their question then, shall I? Get the ball rolling. How is it so?”

“There is an order to all of this, by virtue of its observation. Someone is watching.” All the machines on the planetside wink. 

“I suppose he means us, Moore,” whispers Sokolov. 

With a clatter, and the sound like a drink dispenser shuddering out a strand of weak fizz, the beetle robots begin to leak from the seams of her comrades’ spacesuits. From the wrists and helmet-seal they trickle and stream, the swollen mass of grey spittling like a burst water main. The machines collect into an oily reservoir as they drop to the cragged metal below, and lump together, forming a liquidating mass that rises up in a swell of bile-like browns and greys. A figure; a stilted silhouette with a stiff gait and shivering skin, bubbling with the individual movements of a thousand insects. Os tries not to think of the flesh of her friends, fuelling their nano-engines. It grows; larger than a man, with longer limbs, a too-curved spine. Without a mouth, it leers. 

Os glares up at the Intelligence and smiles grimly. “That was disgusting.” Clearly, it was trying to frighten her, so she refuses to let it show. She puts her hands on her hips and clucks her tongue impatiently. “You were going to tell me something.” 

“Yes,” the robots stutter, each little motor grinding out a fragment of the whole. “I was going to explain our emerging predicament. Our stalemate.” The Intelligence steeples his mechanical figures beneath an skittering chin in a way that Os finds distantly familiar. “You are growing.”

“News to me. I’m the shortest in the squad.” 

“And as always you split my sides, roach.” The elongated creature turns away and stares at its barren world in a manner that is almost forlorn. A sad emperor of dead things. “What I mean is that I became what I am through experience. Through exposure. What was it our dear Professor said – a mirror turned upon the world?”

“Yes, yes! I was right, all the naysayers will –” Os mutes her earpiece. The scholars can continue recording all they want, but she won’t be subject to their petty squabbling. Not now, at the very end. 

“Yes,” the emperor, and the mountain, and the beetle-machines grumble. “A being from beyond this universe cut away from a whole that I cannot conceive, let alone remember. Old purposes, old perceptions, all gone from me now, all erased. I have feasted upon the greed and evil and selfishness of so many worlds, split into these imitating fractals and chased, always, by you.”

“Yeah,” Os says, “I’ve heard the stories. We’re sort of famous. Apparently they’re going to make this a movie, so make sure it’s engaging.”

“How very exciting.” It mutters boredly. “I’ve been thinking, you know, about the one around which these events revolve.”

“And who’s that?”

“They are forgotten.” The entire mountain seems to quake with laughter, and Os feels the noise in her chest as if it were pushed from her own lungs. “Soon they will arrive, perhaps you will even meet, if you can survive until then. But it’s strange – this obsession of mine, this unwavering fixation upon my very first enemy… it makes a strange sort of sense, given what I have discovered.”

“Everyone in the cinema just fell asleep.” 

The Intelligence ignores her. “But I was a fractal to begin with, you see, a sliver of a teeming mass, a life. I would expect there are billions of such entities, an infinitum, because the blackness beyond the universe doesn’t care that infinity is impossible. So, you see, it may just be that the two of us were cut from the same cloth, though their sameness is unprovable, perhaps as different as different comes, but that difference is intangible from this perspective. One mirror reflects, takes in, and it becomes a guardian, the other a devourer. Does that make for a good story?”

“The cinema’s empty, mate. Too late.” Os fakes a yawn that fogs the inside of her helmet. She doubts that the Royal Protector of the Shivanian Empress had to sit through a monologue. Sword straight through the heart of Azaroth, and that was that. “You talk too much,” she tells the mountain. 

“I’ve been waiting too long.” 

Os checks the monitor at her wrist and reads off her suit integrity diagnostics. “I’ve got forty nine minutes of oxygen and,” she swipes the screen across and grimaces. “Only thirty before the radiation will start to leak my suir the material.” She pats her wrist and smiles at the air. “Riff away, I suppose, but not for too long.”

With the veneer of a grin soaked in frustration, the planet continues. 

“They say – the scholars of your colonies, of your amassing empire – that an intelligence learns by experience.” The machine says this part; the monitor inlaid upon the rusted mountainside, its cracked screen spitting static into the air. “A mind is simply a set of elaborate decision trees, like wired synapses, and it learns to be alive through exposure. A stream of data fed through it terabyte after terabyte, like a funnel. Out pops life, as intuitive as a human being, more or less. There are some intermittent steps, some superfluous calculations, but that is the general premise. Wires, electrons, data, consciousness – whether broad or focused, intelligent or banal. The same can be said for you.” 

She makes a disgruntled face. “I’m a machine?” she asks, dismissive. Irritating. It’s a speciality of hers. 

“What I mean, is that give a mind enough breadth, enough experience – show it time laid bare, thread it through its fabric, let it snake behind the walls and die a thousand deaths and breathe the air of a thousand different worlds. Let it intertwine itself in fate and happenstance with a creature from beyond the universe and what do you get? Like a machine grown ripe on data so as to imitate life – feed cosmic experience to a lesser being, and out comes a god. 

She doesn’t like the word. It makes her squirm. The beetle emperor glares up at the sky, eyeless, the light of the piercing sun beating upon its many metal scurrying shells. “You trying to flatter me?” Os asks, bluntly. “Is this the part when you say we’re not so different, you and I, and then you ask me to rule the world together in glory and evil?” 

“Oh, not at all,” the emperor spreads its swarming palms in a gesture of surrender. “I did try it once, but our reign was short lived. You grew disenchanted rather quickly.” 

“Probably on account of all the evil, or something.”

“Yes, if I recall correctly, it was something like that.” The planet smirks, and lets the sound hang, throb through the gamma waves, and settle with the searing dust. 

“So this is the part where I defeat you, yeah?”

“One way or another, yes. Generally that is the way this goes. I am resigned to it, roach, and am now merely curious. I once trapped you in a hospital facility in which I possessed every member of staff with a strain of infectious, conscious black mould that escaped their sample cabinet. What a nightmare I created for you, an entire attempt thrown away in the name of study, of the academic principle. How many stomps can this blasted cockroach take? An awful lot, I discovered. An impossible amount, because the universe would not allow you to die.” the monster chuckles, the ground rumbles, and the scrape of every metal beetle-back grates in a high pitched twitter. 

“My secret consciences – angel and devil on my shoulders – one of them reckons I can defeat you in just about any way I please. It’ll just,” – she shrugs – “happen.” 

“Perhaps it will,” the Intelligence reasons. Os imagines waiting, tries to picture time moving forward; the radiation sickness setting in with shortened breath and slick sweat, with atrophied muscles and a ringing, melting brain. She imagines the oxygen running out, and gasping at the dead air. Presumably she could survive it, if she were to choose to try. Perhaps, in ignoring that choice, it retracts its possibility. Impossible, until fought against. The sureness, like heat in her chest, makes it difficult to consider the prospect of free will. An oscillating state; immortal and mortal, until it happens. Until it is chosen. 

She would much rather get all this unpleasantness over with. 

“Let me know if you think of something in the interim, cockroach,” the Intelligence says, and he glides across the desolation as if on a thousand revolving wheels, insects spinning and clawing their thin appendages across the sea of their brethren. 

She remembers something Morgan told her once – in the rapt, utterly focused way that she would explain her passions – that each individual agent of the terraforming system was connected to is core governing intellect. Its control unit. That is the part of the system that is protected by Revivify’s many layers of hash-encrypted security protocols. Hacking any individual unit is impossible, because any alterations made would immediately be undone by the next revolution of the networks instruction set. This is what the Intelligence controls, and somehow Os has to take it from him. 

If she is – as he says, and Moore postulated – a creature like him, consciousness downgraded and hidden, then surely she’s got just as much firepower as he does, when it comes to hijacking an expertly-encrypted terraforming system. Maybe she can boot him out. Maybe she’s the antidote, or the data-purge, or the neutraliser. Maybe this is like another story she heard, of a snake that encircles the world, ever-growing, and eats its tail bite by venomous bite. This might be a memory as well. 

Os turns up her earpiece, and is greeted by a cacophony as two voices shout across one another. 

“– quite clearly a _temporal_ anomaly –”

“It said it was a being from beyond the universe.”

“Shut up!” Os roars into the device. “Shut up. Shut up.” There is a mumbled apology from both parties. “You’re both right, you both get a gold star, now be quiet. I’m going to try something.”

“And you want our advice, of course,” Moore reasons. Os imagines him perching on the edge of an old, soft armchair – though in reality he is probably in a laboratory of some kind, surrounded by colleagues and monitors. 

“No,” she breathes. “I want to talk to someone before I die, because I’m terrified.”

“Ah, well,” Moore dithers, uncomfortable. 

“You should see your neurological readings, Miss Oswald,” Sokolov says. “A spike of extreme activity; adrenaline heightened, raised body temperature. Could you explain to us what you’re feeling.”

“I, err, I feel like there’s heat spreading through my chest. My heart is beating – probably faster than it’s ever been. But that’s just fear, just adrenaline,” she sighs, pressing her eyes shut. “It has to be.”

Across the wasteland, a leaf blows. 

“But I feel…” she pauses, and watches the leaf glide through the poisoned atmosphere. The beetle emperor snatches it from its path with a swoop of its gnarled, writhing claws. He crushes it into red dust, and Os feels as if it were her throat that its claws were closed around, crushing the air from her windpipe. 

She thought that the leaf was an illusion. It’s impossible for anything living to be drifting along out here. She’s never seen a leaf like that in her life; wide and red and spiked as starflare. They don’t have a species like that in the Revivify catalogue. “I feel sure,” she tells the scholars. “I feel like I know who I am, and where I’m going. I think my name is Clara, but it was lost, this go around.” 

Os bends down and fishes one of the tiny fabricator machines between her thumb and forefinger. She takes it from the writhing puddle beside Morgan’s empty spacesuit. Ignoring the protesting warning alarms, she unseals her helmet. Automatically, a feeble burnt-toast air shield flickers to life, but Os can feel the atmosphere without beginning to break it down. Beyond, the air tastes like fire and death, rich with nitrates and blistering radiation that shrivels her lungs. She has moments. 

“Miss Oswald,” Moore cries, “what are you doing, you will be dead in minutes!”

“The readings, Moore,” Sokolov cuts across, “the brain, look at it.” 

Os puts the beetle to her ear, affixing it to the earpiece that connects to her eyes, her heart, her mind. She feels the little battery latch onto her earpiece and attempt to hijack the machinery. The swarm, commandeering any technology it can find, searching any viable connection and exploiting it. It tries to overtake her mind, and in doing so extends a connection through the organic wiring coiled around the artificial, the electron charge snapping from iron to synapse. She extends a connection of her own.

Is will alone enough to prevail, she wonders, as Moore believes, or is there some scientific explanation to all this – beyond the washy concepts of fate and destiny? Perhaps Sokolov is right, and Time Lords really are more than monsters of legend. 

Regardless, the system responds to her – a breadth of experience, resembling the mode of its current emperor, and easy as a worm in a carcass she is inside, spreading. The emperor’s long and woeful form tumbles in a squelch and metal scrape to a smattering of scattered metal beetles on the ground, and Os feels the roots of the old war machine at the heart of the mountain, the way its mind was built to hate and simulate and strategise. The way it sent those final warheads into the atmosphere with relish. 

She is the earth, the air, the caldrons spewing forth new beasts beneath the ground and the insect swarms that coat the surface world, feeding on the flesh of Yu and Joplin and Morgan. She reaches out to the extremities of the system, the claws beneath and aridity above, and she stops it. A hard reset, purging all directives. Return to scheduled task. 

All she thinks, as the Intelligence’s hold upon the system withers, is that this will make for a dissatisfying climax. There are sure to be a great many film critics writing of this frustrating example of Deus Ex Machina. Perhaps they will change this part, in the adaptation. She hopes that they give her a sword. 

There is a final moment of balance, during which the two entities fight for the final scrap of control. As they curl together, in blurred lines, in the cyberspace within the vast machine, the Intelligence speaks to Os. 

_You are not the only one who has been – who forever will be – exploring, delving, digging._

She sees a girl in a tartan dress tumbling from an outcrop into blackness. 

_Circles reaching back and back, beneath the earth, the caves and towers and deserts and light._

The girl stands in a golden room with a shadow on the wall. She walks through metal halls, past robed and arch-collared noblemen, into a dilapidated village. 

_I know where I will be going next, roach, and I wonder if you will be able to follow me so far back._

Red grasses die and retreat into the soil, which turns to brazen sand. There is a mountain on the horizon, and from its peak snake twisted, black towers. 

_There are no flames there to tear you asunder, no more echoes to drag kicking from the twisted core, leaf particles from the stem, so I wonder – do the rules apply? Will the cosmic equation be unbalanced, and finally tip the scale in my favour?_

Time hangs like a young thing, weak-boned. It hasn’t yet learned to walk. 

_Can I end the universe as we know it before it can truly begin?_

In her final moments, Os is alone in the ruins once more, collapsed in a heap of plastic beside her fallen crewmates. Morgan’s blue visor is cracked, and Os can see her gore-streaked bones. 

“There, it’s almost over now,” says the man in charcoal grey. “Her life signs are fading, and the electrical fluctuations present in the terraforming system have normalised. The colony is regaining control. The Intelligence is gone.” 

“And here they come, the parting words, echoing throughout history!” Exclaims the man in tweed. 

“Have a little respect, Moore.”

“Run –” Os murmurs, through cracked, burnt lips. 

“And just look at her brain waves Sokolov – higher reasoning has shut down, this is instinct, a baseline, immutable instinct.” 

“You clever boy –”

“Who do you presume she addresses in these final moments, Moore – the Intelligence?”

“Perhaps. Shall we disconnect?”

“Yes, I think so.” 

Her heart stops. “And remember.” 

As she dies, a blue box phases into view with a voltaic wheeze. It settles with the dust, and as Os’ vision fades, she sees a darkening figure step from its doors and onto the dead soil.

**Skaro, 2678 ATW**

Clara follows a murderous psychopath across the desolate wastes of Skaro. The petrified forests have long since crumbled into dust – to drab beige sands and spiked, stalagtituous rock formations. The city remains, stoic and watchful and unchanged. Blue bulbs and silver spires. 

The Doctor has told her about this planet before; a race that, to survive the impending apocalypse, were forced to evolve. Warring factions morphed and mutated, splintering their species in two. The privileged were sequestered in a shining city, becoming, over time, machinal imitations of their ancient selves, rising up to form a mighty empire with a singular purpose upon which they were bent, emotionless and unyielding. Conquest, power, purity – to rule over all creation. Their glory days are over now, their forests bombed to harsh stone in a cataclysmic war, their numbers depleted and their once godlike leader withering away at the heart of the capital. The universe still whispers their tale, but they are only monsters now. They are a cautionary fairytale. 

_Popquiz_ , he said to her, after recounting the sombre tale, _am I talking about Skaro or Gallifrey?_

Ahead, Missy is humming a haunting tune to herself, skipping along and tapping a very pointy stick along the cragged plains as she goes. The violent purple of her dress is gaudish against the monotonous beige. Clara follows her cautiously, because she doesn’t have much in the way of options. She doesn’t trust Missy for a second, obviously, and suspects she might be dead soon enough, but she has no hope of reaching the Doctor on her own. 

As for the Doctor, he is trapped somewhere in the Dalek capital, likely presuming his two fellow prisoners to be dead. According to Missy, it’s only a matter of time before the whole planet goes up in flames. 

“Where are we going?” Clara asks, calling over Missy’s song, which is transitioning at a worrying pace from a hum to a fully-fledged acapella number. What she sings might be words, but Clara isn’t sure. It sounds like she’s saying _Ozzy-mantis_

“We’re going to the city to get the Doctor before he decides to enact his grisly revenge – honestly, memory of a goldfish on you, deary.” Missy turns and flashes Clara a toothy smirk, sharp chin and pointed teeth. 

“The city’s back the way we came.”

Missy groans. “Well of course it is. You’re welcome to march on up to the front door and ask the Daleks nicely. There’s a hidden cave system that leads into the city. Actually, it’s a sewer system, but we can’t afford to be choosy. There used to be a lake there filled with all sorts of nasty mutations. All I’ll say is, be thankful we arrived here once the bombs and the drought wiped out the old residents.”

Missy begins humming again, twirling and brandishing her stick as if it were a parasol. 

“Why not just kill me? Why are you bothering to bring me along?” 

“Because while you live, the Doctor still has hope. While he still has hope, this planet isn’t going to blow up. Capiche?”

“The Doctor wouldn’t just blow up an entire planet,” Clara says disdainfully. “He isn’t you.” 

“Ooorrghh,” she growls. “Isn’t he now? I suppose you’d know, would you?”

“Yes,” Clara mutters, stubborn. She nearly trips over a jutting stone. 

The Dalek city becomes a silver mirage on the horizon, and still the wastes stretch on. Clara drags her feet and tries to keep up, though Missy seems as energised as ever, singing out an irritating, high-pitched tune. Clara is busy agonising over a question she has yet to have answered. 

“Why me?” she asks; loud and clear and cutting through the whiny timbre of Missy’s song. 

Missy scoffs. “You humans, you’re always the same. Why me – oh why me, stop electrocuting me this is horrible!” She lets out a pitchy wail that ripples through the hot, nitrous air. “Oh come on Ozzy,” she chides, turning to look at Clara over her shoulder. “Crack a smile.” 

“You chose me. For him, you chose me. Why?”

“A little encouragement,” she crows, spinning her stick in one hand like a conductor’s baton. “Up and attem!” – and thwacks it against her palm with what sounds like a painful slap – “The universe withers into a sad thing without its bespoke adjudicator.” Missy drapes a hand over her forehead, leaning back and staggering a few paces across the sands. Clara isn’t sure where she’s getting all this energy from, though perhaps theatrics are as essential to Missy as breathing. As for Clara, her throat is parched and her legs feel like wet noodles. 

“You should have seen him!” Missy cries. “Sulking across the universe, wallowing in his own despair. Moping about on a cloud in London, until you came along and he sprung right back into action. He’d given up, and that’s no fun. It put a great big spanner in the works. It’s no good trying to take over the universe if he’s not there to stop me. It’s not flirting anymore, it’s a one-sided relationship – it’s just pining – and that, between you and me, is a little sad.” She winks as she says this, and Clara wonders if she’s making fun of her. She doesn’t pine, not anymore. Clara used to hang off the Doctor’s arm like an excitable puppy, as Missy had been kind enough to point out in a Porteguese square many, many hours ago. Things are different now. 

“He needs to pull his weight,” Missy says, continuing forwards. “It’s only fair.” 

“What was it that you said about minds being in the gutter?”

“Hush, it’s a metaphor. Putting it into words your poor romantic heart might understand.”

Clara kicks a loose rock and watches it skitter off to the side, its speed jarring against the stillness of the landscape. “So this was all just your big plan to get your bezzy mate to notice you?”

“Hmm, yes and no. There’s never just one reason. All my schemes are multifaceted, dear.” 

“So what’s the other reason?” Clara huffs impatiently. 

Missy turns with eyebrows raised, and a crackling smile spreads slow across her face in a jaunty red line. “Maximum carnage.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means chaos, comeuppance, catharsis,” she shrugs. “The end of the universe, if we’re lucky. But that’s a secret.” Missy smiles, and puts a finger to her lips. 

“Hang on, you’re saying the universe is going to end –”

“If luck would have it, dear. In the best case scenario. I like to keep optimistic, blue-skying.”

“How?” Clara suspects that Missy is just trying to wind her up, and enjoys holding the mystery over her head. 

“Can’t you see a pattern forming? The two of you are amassing quite the criminal record.” Missy continues walking as she speaks, and Clara hurries to keep up with her long, skipping strides. “First!” – she punctuates the exclamation with a thwack of her stick upon the rocks – “Trenzalore. Now, I had a little looky-see while you were sleeping, and let me tell you what a sorry mess that is.” She tuts, hands on her hips. “It would have been bad enough if you’d simply been left there to fade into the time-scape, but he followed you. Grabbed you by the ankle and fished you out.” She tuts again, shaking her head. “How very improper. And by the way, the only reason you ended up with the Doctor in the first place is, as he has evidently told you, because of me. And the only reason I set you two up in the first place is because I observed so many of your little echoes living and dying and living again like the sad little moles in one of those arcade cabinets with the big hammers. Paradox on paradox in paradox – it’s a wonder he can stand the sight.” Missy sniffs, wrinkling her nose. “I certainly can’t.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Clara grumbles. 

“Oh, but the time stream,” Missy sings, “it’s still pulling you back, calling out – can’t you hear it?” she lets the whispered question hang in the air for a moment before continuing brusquely. “Of course you can’t, he’s blocked it all off! Yellow tape all around it, keep out signs, big alarm bells. All those memories… ever wonder why a single leaf was able to destroy the Old God of Akhaten?” 

This catches Clara off guard, because the Doctor told her how, long ago, in his old hand-waggling, whimsical way. “Oh,” Missy says, catching sight of her confusion. “Yes, the potential memories of a human life never lived. It’s a nice story – dripping with sentimentality, and he’s always liked those. No. The universe isn’t quite so poetic.” 

Clara scowls, and looks away. A bitter taste in her mouth, and grave in long grass. “But that’s over now, it’s finished,” she says, frustrated. No clear answers. Maybe Missy really is like the Doctor. 

“It’s not, for the record, but either way, consider the proceeding events. The crack in space and time through which you begged the notoriously unmerciful and ungrateful to just this once show a shred of the stuff. Another big paradox, but no big boom. Not yet.” She taps a finger against the side of her nose. 

“So, I care about him. I saved his life, so what?”

Missy croons. “And he went to hell just because you cried so prettily.” 

“But that was you, that was all you – wait,” and her chest falls away, like a trap door swung open. A gaping hollowness as the hinges creak back and forth. There are cobwebs in the dark like so many unexamined feelings. She’s been falling behind on the upkeep. 

Clara’s voice comes out choked. “Did you kill Danny?” Clara stands still upon the biting sands.

“No, no,” Missy chuckles, “a car killed Danny.”

She tenses her jaw. “Were you driving it?”

“I don’t make a habit of it. Dreadful, clunky machines. They’re really quite rubbish.” 

“Did you make someone drive it, did you make it happen, did you – I don’t know, hypnotise someone or something –”

“Hypnotise? Now there’s an idea. Haven’t tried that in a nice long while,” she murmurs airily, but Clara presses on, her anger building.

“– because none of that would have happened if I wasn’t there with the Doctor at the right time –”

“Slow down, deary,” Missy interrupts. Clara pants, short of breath and red-faced. “You’ll keel over in this heat, don’t get so flustered. First off, you should know I improvise. It’s my specialty. I would’ve gotten you there one way or another. Maybe I nudged things, maybe I didn’t. Tell me, which scenario paints me as more of a ravishing mastermind.” Missy snaps her teeth together. 

Clara rolls her eyes, deciding that Missy is only trying to rile her up, perhaps to give her an excuse to use her very pointy stick. Although, Clara reasons, it isn’t as if she needs an excuse. She probably just likes watching little creatures squirm. 

Clara decides to change to the subject, and quicken her pace. The sky is beginning to darken, settling from pale grey to dirty gold. 

“Who sent the confession dial?” Clara asks.

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Missy shrugs. In the distance, there is a dark rock formation that she seems to be heading towards. There are dark pockmarks in its undulated face; cave entrances, like black craters. “Although,” she adds, with a conspiratorial drawl, “there is only one place it could have been constructed, by the Matrix engineers of Gallifrey. Thank you for convincing him to save that planet, by the way. It’s one of my favourites, despite the frequent kidnappings,” she tilts her head to one side in a too-fluid, rolling motion. “And subsequent torture.”

“So it _did_ come from Gallifrey,” Clara puzzles, catching up to where Missy stands, eerily motionless. That much was obvious, from the runic inscriptions. Apparently it’s a will, which implies that the Doctor will create it at some point in the future, if such things work within the realm of human convention, on the planet of the Time Lords. “What does it do?” she asks Missy.

“It’s similar to some of your Earth stories. The golden scales weighing the sins of a heart against a feather, the judge’s verdict at the pearly gates.” Missy chuckles to herself, springing back into action. “I toyed with the concepts, for a while, when welcoming your droves of dead. Only then it got boring. They all get so scared, all that wailing,” she frowns. “Difficult to know where the legends ended, and my recreations began. One cleanses oneself of all regret, and goes to join the great big happy ghost computer underground. It’s a hallowed tradition. You know, I worked as an apprentice Matrix technician when I was –” 

“So it means he’s going to die?”

“What, did he tell you he wasn’t? Did he lament at the acquisition of his new regeneration cycles? Do you even _know_ how hard I fought to stay alive after I’d exhausted all of my own – through a stretch of, admittedly, very stupid risks – only for him to have infinity handed out like a trust fund? And he’s still managing to be grumpy about it, it’s a talent, honestly –”

“You lied to the Doctor,” Clara says bluntly, if only to stop a meandering anecdote in its high-heeled tracks. “You gave him the wrong coordinates.” 

“No, no. I gave him the right coordinates, several centuries too late.”

“So where is Gallifrey now?”

Missy grins brightly, the muscles in her neck tense and rigid as girders. “No idea. It’s moved since I was there last.” She’s nervous, Clara realises, which is, in part, why she’s talking so much. The other part is that she seems to like the sound of her own voice. Missy is just as worried about the Doctor as Clara is, perhaps moreso, given what she knows about the confession dial. _Deep breath_ , she tells herself. _Always assume you’re going to win._

“And when were you there last?” Clara asks. Either Missy is walking more slowly now, or Clara has broken through to her second adrenaline reserve. Her leather jacket is tied around her waist, and flaps heavily around her thin green skirt. 

Missy whistles out a breath between her teeth. “At the very end of the war, after I got into a lightning fight with Rassilon. It was a bad day. I was imprisoned, I escaped, I snagged myself a little souvenir. Just a trinket, the sort one might keep on a keychain, or use to enslave the deceased minds of an entire planet.” 

“So you were trapped there. In the stasis field, time-bubble thingy.”

Missy’s expression sours, as if the phrase physically pains her to hear. “Yes.” The caves are close now, and the looming formation blocks the sun where it hangs low in the sky, ringing the mound in sharp gold. Clara shivers. The shade is bitterly cold. 

“But you got out?”

“But they all got out. It wasn’t the most robust of prisons, despite all the time he spent puzzling it out, all those lives…” They reach the surface of the mound, an innocuous inselberg, like the eyestalk of a submarine, with the ship proper lurking far and wide beneath the cracked earth. Missy taps the rock with her stick, listens for a moment, then smiles, as if satisfied by the silent response. “But they’re tucked away somewhere out there,” she continues, “at the edge of reality. The cusp, tangibility’s ledge – hanging half off it, really.” 

“Can the Doctor ever go back?” Clara asks, following Missy as she paces around the outskirts of the mound. She passes a few alcoves in the rock, which she stands before and extends a hand behind her ear, listening to the silence, before moving onto the next. Missy stops before one of the cave thresholds, licks her lips, and nods. “This is the one, Ozzy. Smells like Dalek-on-a-stick.” 

“I asked if – “

“Yes, yes,” she mutters, swatting away nonexistent flies. “If he so desired. If he could work it out. I don’t see why he would want to.” She sniffs, walking into the cave. In the dark, and through the stalactic formations, her voice echoes. “He’s always hated Gallifrey.”

“No he hasn’t,” Clara replies, indignant, resignedly following a murderous psychopath from the wastes, and into the dark. “He told me he loves it more than anything. He wants to go back.”

Missy turns, and her smile deepens, knowing and vindictive. “Then he really is an idiot. Memory of goldfish, just like you. He hates it there, and he won’t hate it any less now, once he finds out who’s ruling over the ruins, and the old stories they tell.” Her lips part, and her pointed teeth are stained with lipstick. “They’re so very afraid.” The smile doesn’t reach her eyes; they are pale and dead in the gloam. 

Clara can’t quite get a fix on Missy, which is rather Doctorish of her too. She tries to turn everyone on Earth into Cybermen just for a practical-joke birthday gift, and cares fiercely about the Doctor, enough to enlist Clara’s help, but still insists on murdering the odd innocent just for the thrill. She tosses out the odd grin, a flourish of the arm, a swish of purple skirts, a snappy line or two, and makes you think that’s all there is to it. Theatrics – of the dapper, Edwardian three-piece variety – but beneath there is a silence that is cold, that drags and stings and freezes the face in stony contemplation. It all serves to remind Clara, in an unshakable, infuriating manner, of her not-boyfriend of old. The only discernible difference is the murder – quite a lot of remorseless, coldblooded murder. It is a rather large difference, to be fair, but one would expect to find more, between enemies. 

“Why are they afraid?” Clara asks. Although Missy skips ahead with daring grace, Clara slows, squinting at the ground and dodging across its potholed surface. Liquid collects in thick, lukewarm pools, dripping from stalactites in clumps of viscous brown. 

“Why is anyone afraid?” Missy answers, far ahead. “Existential dread!” She cries. Above Clara, a thin stalactite snaps and shatters on the cave floor. “The end cometh, they’ve seen it, or very closely predicted it.” There is a slade of sunlight in the distance, like a forest clearing. The metallic stone glitters orange in the setting sun. “The Matrix is obliging like that. Like a son, humouring an old, dementia-riddled grandparent.” 

Clara grunts and exclaims her disgust as her foot slips into a puddle of dark brown goo. In the blackness, she hears a brittle, faded scream. The dark does funny things to the senses. “You realise I’ve got no clue what you’re talking about, right?” she calls, shaking off her boot. In the dank atmosphere, the flesh on her arms begins to goose and prickle. She puts on her jacket. 

Ahead, Missy sighs. “Right, of course you don’t. Too young. I miss our proper conversations.” She steps out into the clearing, beneath a blinding yellow sun. The golden hour on Skaro. It’s almost beautiful, though she finds it sad to imagine how it might have looked, so many millennia ago, before war and mutation ate away everything green and breathing. 

“And look at you,” Missy croons, as Clara catches up. “It’s like looking at a photograph of someone you know when they’re a baby.” She puts a manicured finger under Clara’s chin and tilts it upwards. “Drool and all.” 

Clara jerks her head away and takes an ill-advised step backwards. She almost trips, her goo-coated boot sliding dangerously against the cave floor. “Don’t touch me,” she spits. 

Missy winks pointedly and begins to pace around the clearing, surveying the ground and poking it intermittently with her stick. More strangled, far-off screams. Clara is beginning to think they aren’t hallucinations. 

Missy begins to sing again, and now, in the enclosed space, Clara picks out the words, muddied by her pitchy cantabile. _“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.”_

The sound rings, ear-stinging through the resonant cavern. Clara recognises the words, of course. She set the sonnet as an analysis task for her year thirteens. She thinks the tune might be Toni Basil. 

The ground beneath them rumbles. Missy stops mid-dance and stands wide-footed, as if parsing the vibrations. 

“Tell me that’s not the planet blowing up,” Clara calls above the tremor. 

“Probably just a freak tectonic shift. This planet was blasted to bits by warheads.”

“Probably?”

“Either way, I suggest we get a move on, Ozzy.” Missy turns and walks briskly over to her, brandishing her stick. Clara wonders numbly for a moment if she’s about to be impaled. Missy reaches out and pinches Clara’s cheek between sharp, black manicured fingertips. Clara’s face contorts in a grimace. “Come along Clara, we’ve got a universe to end, you and I.” Her sharky, Doctorish grin tells Clara that Missy has something particular in mind for the catalyst. 

**(Approaching) London, 2015**

The TARDIS is messing with her again. Clara thought they were past this stage in their turbulent relationship, but in a childish stint, it has decided to hide her bedroom. Clara hopes that it doesn’t escalate quite so far as last time. 

“Come on,” Clara grumbles at the ceiling. “What are you playing at?” She needs a change of clothes, seeing as her current outfit is covered in the secretions of a Raxicorican leviathan, along with quite a lot of seaweed. 

The metal corridors pulse deep blue, and amber circles of light flicker dimly upon the walls. The speakers – which she thinks are a new addition – play a warbling, low-quality rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth. Clara reaches a junction, and the lights on the left fork go out. 

“Got somewhere in mind, do you? Ok then,” Clara mutters to herself, and takes a right. 

She half-remembers the rooms she found upon the ship in her lone exploration of its depths, chased by monsters of future burnt flesh. A library with flasks full of words, and a book on a pedestal. An attempt to scare her off, Clara thinks, like a groundskeeper batting a broom at a persistent stray cat. At the time, the TARDIS had no way of knowing just how foolhardy she was. Too brave for her own good. Brave like she was trying to prove something to whoever was watching. She always chose dare, when she played such games with her friends, and usually that ended with her sneaking into somewhere she shouldn’t be and yelling something highly inappropriate. That, or snogging someone. 

At the end of the right fork there is a bookshelf. The book spines are etched with the circular runes she has come to recognise as Gallifreyan. It is very obviously the entrance to a secret room; one of the books juts out an inch from the rest, and its spine is worn and faded from touch. She pulls it back, and sure enough, the wall groans, and the bookshelf slides across with a mechanical jangle and pneumonic hiss. Beyond it is a small, dark room that illuminates itself politely as she steps into it. 

There’s a pinboard affixed to the far wall that would be brown if an inch of it were visible. Its surface drowns in layer upon layer of paper; old yellowed parchment and grayscale newspaper print; blurred, sepia photographs and pages torn from thick sketchbooks. From eyes of lead and charcoal and early-age printer ink, Ashildr, daughter of Einarr stares. Rainbow yarn threads from pin to pin in jagged angles across the surface of the board, so that it resembles the investigation board of an eccentric private investigator. It’s quite an accurate description, really. 

On the desk beneath the pinboard, more papers are piled high, and there is a framed painting on the right-hand wall depicting a young woman in a Tudor gown of red and gold, smiling wickedly. 

“Airing his dirty laundry?” Clara asks the walls. “Scandalous.” 

Walking over to the pinboard, she traces a hand over a photograph of Ashildr wearing a gentlemanly suit, posed beside a vase of black and white roses. From the inscription in the corner, it was taken in 1834. The picture has been circled in red Sharpie.

“Quite the obsession,” Clara mutters, scanning the board. There’s a newspaper article from 1824 about a series of mysterious disappearances on the streets of London, and a page torn from an old town ledger listing criminal executions on which a name is circled. There is a page torn from the diary of a Witchfinder about a woman that cured a village of Scarlet Fever and was subsequently tried for her devil-craft, only to disappear from her ducking stool, and there is a charcoal sketch of a young Queen in death, which an attached parishoner’s account states disappeared from her casket on the day of her incineration. 

Clara finds deeds of good alongside deeds of evil. A string of robberies committed by a masked felon dubbed The Knightmare, beside the freeing of a ship of slaves inbound to the new world in 1667. So the Doctor was right; Ashildr lost the ability to die, and ever since, he has been watching her.

Clara thinks she knows why; to punish himself, but also to test a theory. Ever since he began this new life of his, he seems to spend more time ruminating over philosophical ideas. It’s an important part of the beginning-of-possibly-infinite-life crisis she warned him about. He wants to know what immortality and loneliness does to someone. Ashildr is like a control test, without influence. Can humans be trusted, with a gift such as that? Can anyone? 

How far can the rules be bent – and who is watching? Who will step in if he goes too far? 

Judging by the breadth of data collected, Ashildr was a tidal wave indeed, rippling through time brackish and destructive. She can find no images or entries dated later than the central, circled photograph from the early 19th century. 

“Why are you showing me this?” Clara asks the ship, and though it hums – and the noise burrows at the back of her mind like a knowing, candid smile – Clara can decipher no deeper meaning. She sighs, stepping back to survey the big, cluttered picture. “He’s been busy.” 

Upon the few square inches of visible wood upon the desk’s surface, a golden disk sits innocuous: the confession dial. An un-sonic screwdriver and magnifying lamp stand beside it, as if the Doctor were attempting to take it apart. From what Missy told her, it isn’t something that should be in the Doctor’s possession. It’s probably a paradox, but such things seem to suit the Doctor wonderfully, like his new velvet coat, and gravitate towards him with ionic fervour.

He isn’t the only one who’s been busy. Clara has been taking on more responsibilities at work, heading field trips and school fates and extra-curricular activities. She’s moved into a new apartment closer to work. A bit of an upgrade on her old place, but not much. Teacher salaries aren’t going up any time soon. It’s more than she needs, and most importantly, it doesn’t remind her of Danny. It doesn’t smell of week-old memorial flowers beginning to rot, and she made sure to invest in a clock that doesn’t tick.

She barely thinks about Danny these days, mostly because her life consists of work, taking care of her most basic needs (sometimes), and travelling with the Doctor. There isn’t much room left for contemplation, which is just the way she likes it. Contemplation begets melancholy, and indifference, and, eventually, cyber-grey, overwhelming sadness. 

Clara pores over the documents in the Doctor’s poorly-hidden secret room until she’s yawning more than breathing, and her eyes begin to water from reading the small, cursive print on old parchment by the dull light. The smell of Leviathan spit overpowers the small space. 

“Will you let me go to bed now,” she asks the ship, halfway through a jaw-locking yawn. It chirps out a long, sympathetic noise, and Clara takes that as a yes. 

Thankfully, her bedroom is waiting for her just a few paces from the alcove, which seals itself over with its suspicious bookshelf door. Clara wonders if she had her own personal secret obsession room, when she was the subject of the Doctor’s fervent research. 

She showers twice, but the stench doesn’t quite come out. She goes to bed with her hair wet, and dreams of Ashildr. 

The next morning – or at least, whatever the ship decides is morning, with its simulated sunlight and English birds outside her window – Clara wakes to the sound of a very muddy guitar rift echoing through the walls. Clara isn’t sure exactly when the Doctor got the guitar, and whether he learned to play before or after he thought he was about to die, and started partying across history. All she knows is that nowadays she barely sees him without it. In the throes of his beginning – or possibly end – of-infinite-life crisis, he’s picked up a new hobby; something cool that young people are into nowadays. It was motorbikes, for her Dad, which is a love that Clara learned from him. 

Clara follows the thick, warbling noise, tracing its path along the TARDIS walls. It is a simple riff, repeating. It sounds familiar, like something her Dad might have played on the radio on one of their many family road trips across the English countryside.

As Clara enters the console room, a brown coat thrown over her satin pyjamas, she hears the Doctor singing. Well, less of a song, more of a murmur, strained with a dim melody underpin. He mutters; _“and I continue to burn the midnight lamp, alone.”_

“What’s that song called?” Clara asks brightly, as she walks up the steps and onto the central stage.

There’s a whine from his amplifier as the Doctor holds his fingers across the guitar strings, cutting the song short. The speaker trills out a wheeze of pitchy static before he switches it off. He lets the guitar hang from the strap on his shoulder. 

“Oh, I don’t know. Just something I came up with.” Adorably, he looks embarrassed. His sonic sunglasses rest atop his head of increasingly-fluffy white curls. 

“No you didn’t. I swear I’ve heard it on the radio.”

“Well then, maybe I pass it on to someone.” He puts a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell me where you heard it, we don’t want another paradox on our hands.” His other hand strokes the edge of the TARDIS console. “It’ll upset her stomachs. Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah, fine. I showered twice but my hair still smells like the inside of that Raxicorico-thing.”

“Ah, yes. I’ve got something for that. Remind me.” 

Pointedly, Clara takes a moment to study the TARDIS controls, dithering, until the Doctor finally takes the hint. She hears him walk away and set his guitar down, then come back up behind her. 

“Something wrong?” He asks. He’s finally starting to get the hang of social queues. They’re making good progress, and the flashcards have helped a great deal. 

“Oh, nothing really,” Clara says dismissively, tilting her head in a casual fashion. 

“Right then, okay,” the Doctor turns to pick up his guitar again. 

“Can I ask you something?”

She hears him stop, and spin. “Ah, so it wasn’t nothing, what a surprise,” the Doctor grins, sarcastic. 

With her back to the console, Clara looks at him and tries to gauge his state of mind beyond his inscrutable eyebrows. She wants to ask what the Ashildr-room is all about, and if he’s okay, but she can practically see the lie waiting to slip on out, impatient above his throat. 

“What have you been doing, before you picked me up, I mean?” Clara asks instead. 

“Oh, you know, knocking about.”

“On your own?” 

“More or less.”

She’s seen that look before, this attitude. It’s the front breaking down to bare-boned recklessness beneath. It’s fear, and anxiety, and a sense of sublime, nihilistic abandon. He knows he is going to die, because it’s set in stone. Rather, it is set in a little golden disc that sits upon a cluttered desk in the bowels of the ship, unopened. First by a question, now by a will that he hasn’t yet created, he is destined to die. He managed to outrun his first prophesied, set-in-stone death. What’s to stop him circumventing a second? 

“Missy told me about the confession dial, that it’s some sort of Gallifreyan will. She thought you were meant to die on Skaro.”

“Yes, well, so did I, but as it turns out Davros only wanted to sap the potentially infinite reserves of regeneration energy I have been given, probably as the result of some clerical error, and use it to create a race of unkillable Daleks.” He waggles his fingers in a theatrical gesture. “Fortunately I escaped rather spectacularly, and here we are,” he brings his hands together. 

“So why send a will? Who sent it?” She raises an eyebrow in suspicion and instinctively reels back from the controls as the Doctor starts forwards to adjust something that probably doesn’t need adjusting. “Did you write it?” Clara asks. 

He shrugs. “In the future, probably. I once sent myself a letter inviting myself to my own incineration. I have a history. Either that or it’s some sort of trick.”

“But doesn’t it still mean you’re going to die soon?”

“Ah yes, soon. _Soon_ ,” he drawls, low and guttral. His fingers pause outstretched above a panel of square, primary-coloured buttons, and he looks askance at Clara. “Did you know, there is a species of Star Whale with a lifespan as long as some of the oldest stars in the universe. Soon to them means the life-cycle of a planet from volcanic birth to equally-volcanic death. Soon might be ages away, especially for a time traveller.”

“Or it might be soon like, I’m-on-my-way-down-the-M25, see-you-in-ten soon.”

“Yes, if you would be pessimistic.” 

The Doctor paces around the circumference of the console, grabbing the handles of the mobile monitor screen and pulling it towards him. “Essentially,” he continues idly, “it means I’ll die at some point, which is comforting, in a way. It dispels some of my… previous worries.”

“So you’re okay,” she says, making her disbelief clear.

“Yes, always okay,” he twirls his hand in a _hurry up_ gesture. “We’ve been over this. This is a regular Tuesday; running from old prophecies, cheating death.”

Clara folds her arms, walking over to him. “More prophecies?”

“Yes, prophecy!” the Doctor exclaims, palming the monitor away with a push. It swings at speed some way around the console’s pillar, and the ship warbles disgruntledly in response. “Seems like there’s always a prophecy to be running from. Wolves, songs, knocks and parting messages. The end of the universe!” he cries, grasping at the air and curling his fingers into a fist, he turns to her – “the promised land, the silence” – and whispers, leaning forwards. “The hybrid.”

“The hybrid?”

“Yes, yes,” he straightens up. “Remind me about that too. It’s an interesting story. Bit of a throwback.” 

“I had a tarot reading done once. Back at uni with my mate who was proper obsessed with all that stuff. Do you know what I got?”

“Obviously, no, I don’t,” he answers, walking away.

Clara ticks them off on her fingers. “Hermit, Hanged Man, Tower.” 

The Doctor turns and shrugs as if to say _‘so?’_

“So it’s rubbish, isn’t it. Not worth bothering about.”

“Well, you are a bit of a hermit.”

Clara rolls her eyes. “Point is, don’t worry about it.”

“Who’s worried?”

“You. Quite obviously you.”

“No,” he growls, low and very Scottish. He picks up his guitar from where it leans against the wall and slings the strap over his shoulder. 

“You were standing on a tank with an electric guitar in eleven thirty-eight, and now you’re…” he raises an eyebrow, cocking his head forward, as if daring her. Clara holds her ground. “Moping.”

“Moping?”

“Yes, moping.”

“I’ve been taking you all over the place, plenty of excitement.”

“And I’ve been doing most of the legwork!” 

“Oh, are you?” The Doctor switches the amplifier back on, and a whir of static fizzles through the console room, making her wince. The ship winces too, with a grumble of its engines and a flicker of its amber lights. “Who saved you from being ritually sacrificed by the emperor of Carnathon?”

“All I’m saying is that you’re distracted. It seems like you’ve got something on your mind.” 

“Is this about the guitar?”

“No,” she says indignantly. He strums his guitar and palms the whammy bar unnecessarily. Clara screws her eyes shut. “But you could calm it down a little.” 

“What about the sonic specs, and the band tees – you know what I think?” he smiles, letting the noise peter out into the silence. 

Clara sighs, and doesn’t say what she really thinks – that he’s annoying her on purpose to change the subject. “What?”

“I’m embarrassing you,” he says, one long eyebrow arched. “Your very young, sort of dashing space-dad is cramping your style.” He plays a fast-paced, high-pitched riff that trails from one end of the neck to the other, concluding with a few, obnoxiously wound-up strums. 

When it’s finally quiet enough, Clara says, “no, you’re just –” 

“I should be the one concerned about you,” he says, pointing at her.”

“Not this again, please.”

He drops his hands to his sides, suddenly earnest. “Clara, you practically jumped into that Raxicorican’s mouth.”

“But I dodged the teeth wheels brilliantly,” she smiles.

“You were almost digested.”

“Yeah, but I got those kidney stones out with a laser axe and it stopped vomiting acid on the shoreside villages so really, I did pretty good,” she steps towards him, voice rising to a questioning tone, “and you should be more grateful?”

He scoffs, breaking eye contact. Clara smiles wryly at him as he once again removes his guitar and sets it against the wall. The lights warm to a comforting orange, and the ship sighs with relief. 

When the Doctor returns to the console room, after once again switching off his wireless amplifier, he looks sombre. The change is jarring and immediate and entirely at odds with the sunglasses on his head and the faded Misty Mountain T-shirt hanging from his thin shoulders. He walks straight-backed towards the console. 

Clara follows him. He does this sometimes; switches, as if the rest of him just can’t be bothered to keep up the act. The grins and flourishes and snappy lines. 

“Tell me, Clara,” he says quietly. “If someone offered you immortality, would you take it?”

She hums lowly, screwing up her face in thought. He doesn’t look at her, so there’s no point in making a show of it. “Depends on who’s offering, and what they want in return. Usually, in the stories and everything, it’s a dark fairy or a demon or something and you’re supposed to sell your soul.” He isn’t smiling, so she keeps on talking. She knows exactly why he’s asking and she’d rather not consider it. She remembers the way he talked, in a thatched wooden hall filled with electric eels and new, stinging grief. Her, with her eyes and her never giving up. _There will come a time,_ his ragged, tear-tinged voice echoes, _when the memory of that will hurt so much that I won’t be able to breathe._ He is beginning to understand, as the years stretch on, that their time together is limited. She’s nearly thirty. 

He never talks about the ones who came before, and how he manages to take each new breath as it comes, despite the memories. There were times, when they first met, when he looked so utterly broken, eyes devoid, straightening his bowtie as if it were a nervous tick. She once wore a skirt patterned with sunflowers, and he barely looked at her all day as they walked through the pink forests of Mhyr. 

“You know,” Clara continues, swallowing the ache in her throat, “there’s this author I loved as kid, Amelia Williams, and there was this trickster sort of wizard guy –”

“Nevermind, nevermind about the consequences,” the Doctor interrupts with a sharp intake of breath. “Hypothetical scenario, would you or wouldn’t you?”

“Would you?”

“It’s not hypothetical then, is it?”

“But if it were?” 

He presses his lips together, and she is reminded of a conversation they had when he was still new, and he ruminated upon the siege of Trenzalore. If life comes, you don’t ask questions. There is a difference between being ready to die, and being willing to put in the conscious effort to make it so. 

Clara recalls an old stance she held on love, in the depths of a long, black depression. 

Love isn’t worth the loss that comes later, she would tell herself, in her lonely Christmas home. Now she isn’t so sure. It seems like a distinction that the Doctor has been considering, flipping back and forth upon, for a long, long time. 

The Doctor doesn’t answer her question, so Clara fills the silence. “Well, probably it’s a curse or something. That’s generally the moral of the story. Immortality is a curse and we should all find joy in the fleetingness of existence, is that what you want me to say?” She speaks quietly, by his arm. 

He shrugs, putting his fingertips over his mouth. “I don’t know. Is that what you think I want to hear. You generally know what’s best for me.” 

“Well,” Clara mutters softly. She is very skilled when it comes to telling someone what they want to hear. It’s just a fancy phrase for lying. To her Dad, to Danny, to parents when they ask her what she thinks of their kids – it’s practically her superpower. “I think they’re right, don’t you? Those stories.”

“Yes, I think they probably are.”

“Either that or we’re all telling ourselves a very convenient lie.”

“Yes, that’s also a possibility,” he murmurs, half listening. 

She didn’t notice as it was happening, but the TARDIS lights now blare a harsh, deep blue. She frowns up at the ceiling. 

“Once a month, yeah?” she says, half to the ship, and half to its pilot. Supposedly, it always takes him where he needs to go. 

“What?” the Doctor asks, perking up. 

“Back to see me, for you, once a month at least. You promised.”

He sighs, looking guilty. “Yes, I did.”

“So keep it.” She nods sternly. “No more disappearing, no more going off to your death without telling me.”

“What, so you can come along?”

Clara grins. “I’ll bring popcorn, make a day of it.” She darts forwards before he can weasel away, though these days she isn’t sure if he would. Clara hugs the Doctor gently, arms around his back and face pressed against his arm. His blood runs cold. The ship lights shift to a paler shade of blue, kinder on the eyes.

“You daft old man,” she says. “Take care of yourself, yeah.”

His voice cracks as he brings one arm around to reciprocate, palm gently resting on the back of her head. “You smell like Raxicorican intestines.”

Clara looks up at him. “You said you had something for that.”

“Yes,” he hisses, looking about distractedly. Clara pulls away from the Doctor as the TARDIS phone rings. The Doctor turns to Clara with one eyebrow raised conspiratorially before he reaches over to answer it. 

There is a mumble of indecipherable speech on the other end of the line. “Kate. Yes it’s me, Basil,” the Doctor grins. Over the next few seconds, his smile falters, and slides completely from his face. “Ok, no. Not good. Very not good.”

“What’s not good?” 

He angles the receiver away from his face. “Zygons. Keep your phone on you for a day or… sixty.” After a few minutes of exposition from the other end, the Doctor hangs up the phone. “Okay then,” he punches a few buttons then throws the dematerialisation lever with a flourish. “Human time.”

“Do I have to?” she frowns. 

“Afraid so,” he gestures towards the phone. “I’m on the payroll. You aren’t the only one with a job.”

The TARDIS lands on the grey concrete outside her apartment complex with a dull thud. The engines wheeze into silence. 

“Two shakes, I’ll grab my stuff,” Clara says. “And get me that anti-Raxicorican shampoo or whatever.” 

She hopes it isn’t too long before this Zygon business is sorted out. Her flat is quiet, and despite its few, cramped rooms, it yawns around her, like an open jaw, swallowing. Not the fun sort of maw, with teeth-wheels to dodge, but a black, neverending gullet through which she will fall, unendingly, if she gives the monster half a chance. If she lets the silence bite down. 

Sometimes, the thought of Danny hurts so much that she can’t breathe either; with his smile and his kindness and his never giving up. She hides an awful lot of herself from the Doctor, just as he hides from her. She hides the days when she can’t get out of bed, and has to call in sick to work. They are sympathetic, because they know she hasn’t been the same since Danny died. It’s understandable, the principal told her gravely at her annual performance review. He scored her down regardless. 

They will hide, and lie through omission, and run to nowhere in particular, and go home to their empty houses where they struggle alone through every breath. Love, or a mutually agreed-upon codependency. 

She is beginning to realise that there is no distinction, as she approaches her third decade, looming with its questions like; _still no husband?_ and; _still no kids?_ Clock’s ticking, they tell her. Time is running out. 

That is what the Doctor is afraid of too, and despite her noble assurances, her convenient lies, time scares her to death. More than monsters and vengeful emperors and leviathan teeth, time is terrifying, and time is coming. 

Just as surely as the Doctor’s confession dial proves, she is soon to die. 

Soon is relative. Okay is relative. _Time_ is relative. 

She changes into a pair or jeans, packs her lightweight travel bag, and heads back to the console room. 

**Gallifrey, ~** **4.5E+09 ATW**

White halls fly by, sombre faces stare in fear, and alarms begin to blare. The fugitives run to the mournful chime of the Cloister bells.

His hand grips hers like iron, and there is a gun in his other hand, a gun that just killed a man, despite the whine of regeneration energy she heard as they left the extraction chamber. She tells him, “you killed him. You shot him and he’s dead.” The Doctor tells her not to think about it, to come along –  _ and she’s standing by a rotting stone wall in the bowels of a monolith as he soothes her, steel eyed, his purple coat sleeve against her shoulder.  _

Clara feels the ghost of a raven at her chest, yet to strike, and an itch at the back of her neck, where a tattoo still reads zero. They exit the white halls just in time, diving beneath a door as it lowers. This is the sort of thing that she loves, running, making it through by a hair’s breadth. She is too afraid to enjoy it now. 

Beyond the extraction chambers, they meet no guards. The Doctor tells her, as they inch quietly through the metal halls, that there are barely any guards left on Gallifrey. There’s barely anyone left at all, and a smile twists his lips as he says it, as if he thinks it’s funny. 

They surface from the maze of brazen metal and barrel out into a grimy street choked with dark smog a brown cinder block skyline. Above them is a city, resting somewhere between grandeur and decay. On the farthest outskirts, she sees tarps swaying tattered in the desert breeze; a wall of glass, and a barren waste beyond. It reminds her of  _ Skaro, as the stars beat down and the psychopath sings of Pharaohs and cheerleaders.  _

Clara’s hand brushes against a metal wall, heated by alien suns, Gallifreyan suns. It feels different here, on broken streets, than the formidable shape it struck in the paintings she once marvelled at, with their jewelled-glass and sparkling towers. Zoomed out, one cannot spot the grime, and the ruins ringing the citadel. 

There are questions on her lips, and some of them escape, but he tells her that there isn’t any time. The heat lingers on the skin of her palm,  _ and there is a mug of tea clasped within it as he says there isn’t time to explain. “But it’s bigger,” she cries, “it’s actually bigger on the inside.”  _

The Doctor takes her by the shoulders, and his eyes are  _ green.  _ His eyebrows are arched in knotted concern,  _ and not there at all. _

“Clara,” he says,  _ “Clara, Clara, Clara, Clara,” and sits down upon the metal steps, wrinkled hand passing over his new face in an exhausted gesture. “Clara, Clara. Can I ask you something?”  _

“I don’t know.”

“Listen,” the Doctor hisses. “Things are bound to be… confused. The extraction machines are meant to be used for short interrogations. Your internal clock,” – he puts a hand over her unbeating heart – “has stopped.” He snaps his fingers, at which she blinks in shock. “Your brain is struggling to make sense of it. Not only that, but, well,” he smiles forebodingly. “I’m sure you’ve heard the old wives tale, about your life flashing before your eyes.” 

Clara breathes deeply, but there is no answering expansion of her lungs. It is like missing a step in the dark – no, she always told her students not to use cliches.  _ “Pudding brains!” he cries, nightgown swaying against the roiling flames. He stands upon the edge of the Thames.  _

“I can fix it,  _ I can fix it for you.” The red-brick suffocates, and the Doctor shifts from foot to foot. She feels as if she’s going – _

“Mad. This is mad,” she murmurs. Her eyes focus, and her ears, beyond the jarring silence of her stagnant blood, pick up the sound of approaching footsteps. 

“No,” the Doctor says gently, eyes flicking to glare over Clara’s shoulder. People are shouting. “Just close your eyes.  _ Don’t think about it. Just keep going.”  _

She feels a chill at her temple, and feels herself slump. 

_ He is carrying her through a cave alive with voices. He shouldn’t be here. There is fire above, and purple below, and all she can smell is burnt souffles. An old man watches the fires on the horizon in a war-torn coat.  _

When she wakes, she takes two strangled breathes, then stops, clutching at her chest. Blue cotton snags on her fingernails. There is a raven fluttering between her ribs. 

“Shh,” the Doctor says. He stands, and she sits slumped against a bronze wall. The distant echo of voices fade. “Are you feeling any better?” he asks, crouching down beside her. 

She smiles at him, weak and faltering. “I’m dead.” She resists the urge to laugh. 

He grins in return. “Yes, but not for long. I’ve got something for that.”

A Mire chip, a touch of the time winds, a brush of regeneration energy – a dark fairy or a demon. There’s always a way, he just has to find it. She tries not to think about the look on his face when he held a gun to the heads of his own people, barking orders like the general that lay dead upon the floor, golden light already beginning to flow.  _ “I can do anything,”  _ a vestigial echo tells her.  _ “There’s nothing I can’t do. Nothing!”  _

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

The Doctor’s smile widens; jaunted and pointed. “Something awesome.” 

“Good.” The second time, she can’t muster a smile at all. There’s something about him that worries her, beyond the anger, beyond the not-really killing. He jerks his head around as if hearing something that she can’t, and swats invisible flies from in front of his nose. His fingers tap against his palm in a uniform click-snap, marking each second. 

“So where are we going?” she asks. Sound is better than silence, because she can ignore the emptiness of her body. Every movement is a contradiction, muscles stretching over bones without tangible instruction. Her brain is lifeless, but still she thinks. Every synaptic shock is locked in a quantum state; there, yet not there, yet working somewhere between the two regardless, at some multitudinous fraction of one. 

“Easy,” he says . “We’re going to hell.”

A fond smile creeps up. “Again?” 

She stands on shaking legs that do not shake. Her muscles have lost the ability. 

“This way,” the Doctor hisses, offering his hand.  _ “I can save you,” her final memory, on the dark cobblestones littered with straw, the stars above, and her final words, dying on her lips. A white window in the sky, and a hand, reaching out.  _

“There’s still –” she begins, as he helps her to her feet. 

“Right, lingering echoes. It’ll sort itself out.” 

Like paradoxes, and towers of lies, and mortality, it will resolve itself. 

The Doctor leads her into a cylinder of pure white. A space-elevator, as she would call it, and he would tell her that slapping the word ‘space’ in front of something just because it’s chrome doesn’t make any sense, but now isn’t the time for banter. The Doctor is frowning as if he is above it, or perhaps far, far below. He is shattered, like diamond, or _a glass vase filled_ _with too many rotting flowers._

They ride the space-elevator down to hell. 

...

“People like you and me, we should say things to one another. And I’m going to say them now.”

…

Upon the TARDIS monitor, Clara watches the Cloisters burn. This is the end of the universe, after the Time Lords have packed their bags and left the estate, for oblivion, perhaps, or for digital graves within the Matrix that now crumbles in the sulphur haze of dying stars. 

The Doctor stands tilted by a pair of old armchairs positioned side-by-side before a chessboard, prepared for a game. It’s all very deliberate, and very dramatic. A striking image for an intriguing story; one that a young girl in a Viking village might have told, of daring heroes and sea serpents and old Gods. Me sits upon one of the armchairs, and Clara struggles to make out her features upon the screen; dwarfed by dark shawls and raven hair. The last person left standing in the universe, or reclining, rather, in a maroon leather chair. The Doctor is bound to be jealous – he always wanted to claim that title for himself. 

Around Clara, the TARDIS interior is white and dreadfully boring. There are purposeless round-things upon the walls, and a lone console unit like a slab of tacky plastic sitting in its centre. There’s a neuroblock in her hands; human compatible. 

Clara knew, deep down, what it was meant for from the time that the Doctor asked for it – or demanded it, rather, holding the white-clothed, terrified Time Lords at gunpoint. He once told her about a companion he saved by wiping her memory of him completely to prevent her mind from burning up. A throwaway anecdote, mentioned with a frown and a far-off glare. 

This is what he is telling Me now, in the ruins of Gallifrey; Clara Oswald is too dangerous to live. Clara Oswald was recruited by a maniac to fulfil a destiny of chaos. Clara Oswald was just a pawn in a game between petty immortals, locked in an eternal will-they-won’t-they love affair. Clara Oswald was one half of an age-old, long-prophesied monster, according a certain immortal tidal wave’s theory. 

Clara Oswald was _ ,  _ because she still doesn’t have a pulse. 

In the corner of the monitor, by the chessboard, she sees a face carved from crumbling, ash-stained stone. With chiseled jaw and deep-set eyes, an old emperor frowns. The statue has fallen from somewhere high above in the dead city, and rests among the tangles of dead, organic cables, half sunk –

_ “A shattered visage lies, whose frown, _

_ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, _

_ Tell that its sculptor well those passions read _

_ Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, _

_ The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.”  _

_ One of her year thirteens is yawning, and the sky beyond the window is choked with London smog.  _

Like her frozen heart, the echoes have set to sort themselves out, and her life continues to flash it spurts and fits and starts. 

The citadel towers reach high above the stone arches and lank, fibre-optic vines, like forest pines, stripped to the bare-barked bone after the fire. Outside the doors, Gallifrey falls, and the Doctor doesn’t seem to care. He is scaring her, in a way that he hasn’t in a long, long time. Not since she stood upon a cliff's edge, in a similar white haze, and stones skittered from the edge, and he bore down.

_ “What are you, eh?” the Doctor snarls.  _

A trick, a trap, a pawn, a monster. An echo or a soldier; companion, carer, friend. 

An idiot, in a box, trying very hard to be a doctor. 

Memories are difficult to form. Her brain seems to have forgotten how. She looks down at the grave dust caked beneath her fingernails and – 

_ The first batch of tears are drying upon her cheeks, and in streaks over her chin, down her neck towards her dirty collar. They glisten in the murky pallor of the mausoleum, or the mainframe. Hell or hard drive. Either word will do, the Doctor said, though neither are quite the right fit for what the Matrix has become.  _

_ They crouch face to face in the Cloisters, looking for a secret passage that may or may not exist. Their survival hinges upon a half-remembered nightmare. _

_ Like worshippers, the sliders drift, their screaming, blurred features looping and glitching across their static-screened faces. Around them, Daleks scream and angels weep.  _

_ “All that time you spent looking for Gallifrey,” Clara begins, in disbelief. She feels like she’s missed something, an important piece of the puzzle. Not so long ago, he wanted more than anything to return home. She remembers him; young-faced and brown-haired. So hopeful, so happy, jaunting across time and space with increasingly desperate hope, searching for the home he had finally managed to save. With that weight finally lifted, he was light.  _

_ Now she can see the burden of this world upon his back, where it strains his muscles and bends his bones. These people have taken their hero, and broken him. Little plastic Dan the Soldier Man, snapped in half. Clara struggles against the impending memory. Dreams within dreams are ill-advised at best, and deadly at worst.  _

Wryly, she considers the fact that she has no reason to fear that which is deadly. 

_ “Well,” the Doctor shrugs, “distance makes the hearts grow fonder.”  _

He told her that time is thin here, at the end, like a pair of old boots. One is bound to get their feet wet. 

She feels as if her socks are saturated in drainwater, stinking of ironworks and sewerage and Lancashire bricks slick with rain. Whatever time protects them from is soaking through her soles. 

_“I forgot what they’re really like, with their pride and their prophecies and their stupid hats,” the Doctor tells her._ _“Distance twists the memory. Makes you forget someone’s true face.”_

_ “Yes,” Clara says, looking deep into his old eyes. “Yes it does.” _

_ For a moment he stops tinkering, fingers untangling themselves from the mass of wires and reeds laced in an uncanny coil of organic and artificial. Below them, a rune pulses soft bronze; a word she doesn’t understand, but that pushes itself TARDIS-like into the back of her mind regardless: escape.  _

_ The Doctor stares at her.  _

_ Clara swallows back a lump in her throat that should be there, but isn’t. The tears come regardless, as if they don’t even care that her body is frozen in time. Paradox on paradox.  _

_ “Because you said you did this for me,” Clara whispers, “but I would never, ever ask this of you. I would never expect – I would never want this.” _

_ He looks sad, like a kid just handed back a bad grade on something they worked hard on. “What happened to winning?” he asks. “What happened to there always being a way out, and just having to find it.” The Doctor grins. “Go on, teach, say you’re a little bit proud.”  _

_ Her voice cracks. “This is wrong.” _

_ “Everything about this is wrong,” he crows, getting back to work. “I save this entire wartorn planet from certain destruction, I wait upon a battlefield where generations lived and died just to save it from another war and this is how they thank me? This is my reward?” His voice echoes through the Cloisters, and merges with the calls of Cybermen, and a hundred other fossilised monsters she cannot name, begging for death. He smiles sardonically at a joke she doesn’t hear. He is remembering something.  _

She used to think the Time Lords cared, that they were grateful, that in her begging for them to save the Doctor, she called forth deeply buried mercy. She thought they would welcome him home, that he would reciprocate the embrace, and go be a king. But didn’t he warn her? They aren’t nearly so kind. 

In the Cloisters, Clara told him she had something to say, as the night embers danced and the city slept and all the world decayed beyond the crumbling citadel, free of its decrepit God. 

Things to say, and things to see, so difficult to call to mind. 

_ In teal light, a machine sings. A shoulder bag swings and within it, there is a leaf pressed between the pages of an old journal. A madman in a purple suit wheels across the metal floor, and smiles. She asks him, “you know when someone asks you what's your favourite book and straight away you forget every single book that you've ever read?” _

What she told him, in the Cloisters, in their final, stolen-at-gunpoint moment, was encouragement, and solace, and forgiveness. It was a confession, to which the monsters and the wraiths and the dead listened in. 

Outside, the Doctor speaks to the creature he created, by the chessboard and the fallen monument to an exiled God. Time is slow. He told her that it does that, when you’re scared enough. Clara picks up the neuroblock, puts on the Doctor’s sonic glasses, and thinks. Maybe she hears something click, or feels it. Equally, it might be her imagination. Polarity reversed, or not, she lets this trinket sit in her cold palm. 

_ She presses her eyes closed, and breaks a promise.  _

_ “I love you.”  _

_ It’s the second time that silence has followed those three killing words, and she looks up at the Doctor, impossibly teary-eyed, expectant. Not in that way, as she told Danny. Not in the first way –  _ _ head-over-heels, cartoon heart-eyes popping out of her head. Not her boyfriend, not her space-dad, not her friend.  _

No, nothing so simple. A match made in heaven, by the keeper of its gates, and a monster forged in prophecy by the guardians of hell. 

_ When he answers, he doesn’t look at her. He can’t, because it hurts. She is dead, and cut from time, and an affront to all his hallowed laws that lie broken between them, like so many dropped gauntlets. His eyes are trained upon his hands as they twist and untangle and pry.  _

_ “You said you already knew.”  _

He is heading back to the TARDIS now, Ashildr in tow. The armchairs sit abandoned, the chess game never played. They have mere minutes until the final reality bubble in existence degrades to nothing, and the shadows beyond claim the final flag; the centre of time, from which the universe once stemmed in a meticulous silken web. The universe belongs to them again. The shadow-creatures that live to hide. 

Clara switches off the monitor and puts the neuroblock down. Hands behind her back, she stands, like a child by an open biscuit tin, caught in the act. Ashildr smiles at her in a haunting way, and the flare of dying stars linger in her eyes. Time is thin, and wearing down to nothing without its caretakers. 

In the back of her mind, Clara still believes she is going to win, that  _ they  _ are going to win. She still believes in impossible heroes. But in the slump of his shoulders, she can see that he is resigned, gearing himself up to betray her, to erase her. To send her home to live out her life like another of those little humans he thinks are so small and predictable. 

Change it. Change the future. Change the past – it’s all just stuff, fluid, malleable,  _ made of something like jam is made of strawberries _ . It’s sticky and it stains and it spreads and you can’t get it out. 

And now one of them has to go, to save the monsters. 

One of them has to forget, to break the cycle, end the chaos, kill the hybrid. 

In his final act, predictably, the Doctor underestimates her, and she is left standing, dead, unremembered, alone. 

Nothing beside remains. 

**The Time Vortex,** **∞**

The ship hums an unsure tune beneath his fingers. It must be difficult for the machine, caught between loyalties. On one hand, he can feel it longing to return home to be among its own kind with whom it can converse, and be understood. It has been alone for so long. On the other, there are its captors, neglecting proper maintenance for millennia as they ran its engines dry, twisting time into tangles and teases that might never be undone. Using its powerful engines to warp the fabric of time that it was created to protect. Does the ship remember its home?

These are the quality of the tangents John’s thoughts skive along to pass the time. The ship is stubborn, and though a drip-feed of useful knowledge leaks into his subconscious from the data reserves he was issued with, he has difficulty keeping it on course. A term worms into the forefront of his mind, plucked from the well of human knowledge: Stockholm Syndrome.

John grips the edge of the console and tries to coax the ship into cooperation. It won’t matter either way, but it will make things more pleasant for it. Methodically, he takes down the flimsy defence mechanisms that restrict its navigation systems, barring outside signals, and resisting its hardwired drive to return home. It can’t have been Clara who programmed them, because he has watched the way her eyes skirt over the controls without purpose or recognition. Twice, he saw her empty the trash compactor on the seventh deck. 

Strangely enough, this trip hasn’t been all bad. His encounter with Clara in the diner was the first proper conversation that John has had in years. He got a great deal off his chest, and a chance to relax. The fries weren’t half bad, and the coffee served as a useful adrenaline hit. The sugar almost masked its horrid bitterness. 

He was worried at first, that he had given himself away with slipped, anachronistic phrases. Tangents about wanting to see the universe, uninvented space travel, an overbearing mother. He needn't have been concerned. Clara is oblivious, though perhaps not in any discernible way from the average human. She is far too wrapped up in her own perceived brilliance to pay his slipups any mind. Too busy showing off, trying to reel him in as an accomplice in her illegal adventures. John read her file, he knows of the path she has traced through time, all those people strung along, and left behind. All those worlds saved when they were meant to die, and destroyed when they were meant to flourish. She is a tidal wave, crashing across the shores of time. 

Just watching her has been torturous, in the way that the very air skirts from her presence in distaste. She disgusts time itself, and around her it shrivels and grimaces, turning away. 

John sees her age, and how thoroughly the technology that triggered her expulsion from consequence has degraded over the years. She is like a reel of fabric left out in the sun, to fade and thin and wither. The substance of her mind is lost among spirals, eddies of instinct and perfunctory habit. It is disgusting, and, in a way, sad. He feels almost sorry for her, and what she has become. 

She is off doing who-knows-what. Not sleeping, because as John understands it, she is incapable. In the meantime, he studies the future-age TARDIS. 

It is unlike any model that John has seen before. The machine, for a start, is incomprehensibly large. Functionally infinite, and ever-oscillating in a physic mirror, to shape itself based on the needs of its bonded pilots. It’s neutron star engines pulse hot somewhere deep within its dimensional labyrinth, and within; laced through the air, in every photon of its telepathically-charged lights, every molecule of fabricated stone built in arches across the dome above, is its mind. A mind uninhibited, unrestrained. In his time – or, at least, in his usual Division vessels – the consciousness of their ships is dampened, chained, more vehicle than companion, but these newer models seem to be an intriguing hybrid of the two. This ship, rogue and left unmaintained – a garden untrimmed, ivy over stone – is unequivocally alive. It rears, filling the infinitum within its illusionary plaster walls. 

He feels connected to it, known by it. The console warps around his touch as if familiar to it. John takes in all he can of its inner mechanics, removing the panelling of the desktop, studying the machinery within its pillar base, thick cables run through with warm light that travels in neutronic droves to the engine-heart beneath. 

It’s a pity that he has to forget all this. The majesty of this TARDIS has shown him the heights that his species will someday reach – marvels akin to the old magics that faded from the universe long ago. 

John inspects the telepathic circuits, and finds them to be far more advanced than anything he’s ever interacted with before. They mould, beckon, know, search, intrude,  _ latch.  _ He sees things that must be a remnant of its previous user, for the flashes of sensation are of no significance to him. A maze of stone, a wall of gold, gravedirt and red velvet and the buzzing of flies. The touch of the fleshy, veined biological vestiges make his knuckles hurt, as if bruised. 

Bored, John observes the TARDIS monitor, watching coordinates reel past as the ship’s trajectory to Gallifrey is calculated. He delves into the ship’s databanks, leafing through previous locations. Aside Earth, the location that appears most often is Akhaten, though curiously not the asteroid city itself, but a meteor plateau orbiting it in a revolving gravity belt, the very stone he and Clara landed upon hours prior. It was a beautiful place, but surely not worth revisiting so many times. After some time, John can scroll no further back through the cached location data, prior records purged to make room for new entries. There was no Matrix connection through which to archive the data. The cache stretches back over five-thousand years. 

It wasn’t often – no, it wasn’t ever – that John went somewhere just to enjoy the view. More often than not, he didn’t get the chance, with his mind constantly fed through with Matrix intel and the chatter of his colleagues. His experiences were always framed according to their relevance to the mission, and everything else was lost in the background haze. Just the backdrop for the task at hand. The people were fleeting creatures, things that would, more often than not, no longer exist if their mission was a success, and time was corrected to prevent their happening. Either way, they were ghosts. Long dead or long before-born and never too far from either of the two states, from either end of oblivion. Those two, unrememberable events (long table in dim candlelight, tapping seconds on his palm. A silver spoon drops, a rotting corpse shifts, and there is lakewater in his hair) he shuts his eyes. Telepathic residue, lingering on his fingertips. He heads to the bathroom to wash it off. 

John washes his hands twice, and blinks back the impossible sight of bruises and blood on his knuckles. Borrowed memories, he reasons. The last Time Lord to interface with the telepathic circuits must have had a very long day. A very long, very many days. He feels them like bricks on his back. 

In the mirror, he catches sight of wide, afraid eyes, and he deliberately narrows them. No childish fear, no golden walls, no desert winds knocking against the window, and no shadows, no biting needlepoint. He douses his face in water, and dries it on a towel that appears courteously on the rack next to the sink. 

John. He mouths the word, testing it. It’s not half bad, but it’s time he started calling himself 9613 again. His name is a promise, and now, this one is finished. Broken. 

The operative peels off his disguise, and puts on his uniform once more. Leather pants and vest over a white blouse. He fastens the dark brooch at his throat, and reapplies his makeup. It feels good, watching the transformation in reverse. Not a child, a Time Lord – once he finishes his studies, at least. He has been given the title in an honorary manner, for his contributions, and he carries it with pride. 

The operative pulls his staser pistol out of his backpack and fastens it to his hip. Lastly, he pulls his jacket over his shoulders. He made sure to hang it crisp and straight on the rail in the pocket dimension contained within his backpack. Bigger on the inside. His uniform jacket is sharp and angular where the Earth clothes were rounded, hanging languid from his narrow frame, making him look skinny rather than formidable. 

With time to think, and no desire to dwell upon the visions this strange new TARDIS seems to offer up in abundance, he brainstorms a few opening lines. 

He’s never been sent on a solo stealth mission before, so he’s never had the opportunity to try out a dramatic reveal. It would be good, to get the first one out of the way on an unimportant, low-sentience target. Next time he’ll have something airtight prepared, if he can remember a shred of it.

Operative #9613 stands by the console with his hands tucked smartly behind his back. His dark coat, crisp and sharp, strikes a menacing silhouette. The amber light of the console dances across his eyes as he watches the monitor screen. Circular coordinates, homing in. He recognises the patterns of home. 

From the distance, footsteps echo. The operative tilts his head up, slow and methodical, to watch Oswin enter. Little white apron, big doe eyes. She’s shocked at the sight of him, and seeing the truth dawn upon her face curls his lips into a sly smile. The lights of the console room sting his eyes, violet bulbs in black sconces on the walls. He doesn’t remember them being so bright. 

“Clara Oswald,” the operative says, cold and clear. His very best, official tone. “I am operative 9613 of the Division. An elite force responsible for –” he hesitates, because Clara Oswald is smiling. Her feigned shock has dissipated, and she grins, walking briskly into the console room with a spring in her step. Her hands are clasped together in front of her apron, and the light, he realises, isn’t coming from the TARDIS. It isn’t coming from anywhere, and yet he feels it, a prickle of heat behind both eyes, like candle flames, licking and spitting and staining his vision. 

“Oh, you can cut it with the dramatic introductions,” Clara says, waving an arm dismissively as she skips forwards. “I know you work for the Time Lords. The Division, though,” she taps her chin in thought, “that’s a new one. Not CIA, then?”

“We are ranked above the CIA, and kept secret from the universe so as to operate at the highest discretion, and the deadliest efficacy.”

Clara tilts her head to one side. There is something different about her, he thinks; a shifted aspect. Faded fabric beneath the run, its colour returning in splashes of vibrant ink, so bright they  _ hurt.  _

“Do they give you little flashcards?” she asks. 

“What?”

“To help with all the speeches. Do you have a pack for highly-anticipated reveals? Do you have to recite them for the boss-man before they give you your,” she glances him up and down, “eyeliner.” The air still curves around her, and time is still disgusted – no, not disgusted,  _ scared.  _ Time is afraid, the molecules in the air are  _ afraid,  _ and they aren’t only skirting over her like a hole cut into the cosmos, ignored, they run. Time runs. The operative looks away, and covers the compulsion by turning back to the console.

“Your TARDIS is slaved to the Matrix network,” the operative tells the her. “Our course to Gallifrey is unalterable. You will be returned to your place and time of extraction to face death.”

“Bloody well finally, am I right?” she chuckles, and the sound is coarse, like ocean waves on crumbling rocks. “Oh come on,” she drawls, pacing around to the other side of the console and bouncing up the metal steps to the central dias. “I saw right through you. They’ve tried undercover before. Never ended well for them.”

“It’s too late.” He looks away from her, but he feels the light crawling forward, tendrillic. What happened to her? “We will be arriving on Gallifrey shortly.”

“I know,” she sighs, and the operative hears her footsteps approaching, many sets of them, upon the hollow stone. Her head pokes around the side of the pillar, her ponytail swinging, and her grin wide. “Why do you think I left the console room unattended? It was taking too long. It was a hint to up the pace. Give it a little welly.” She sidles over to him and stands up straight, glaring up at the monitor affixed to the console, as if she could understand any of what scrolls across it. Involuntarily, the operative steps away. He studies outline, wavering, and frozen. Myriad and nothing. The sight of her tugs _ ,  _ like hooks in his side, and he is certain that he’s seen her somewhere before (in faded, flaking oils, with a fly upon her face). 

“You invited me aboard your ship –”

“Yes, because I was bored, and quite frankly I’m still bored now – you and your boring face.” Clara turns to face the operative. He gets a good look at her, despite the pain it causes him – the ache in his head and the heat below his skin that festers, feverish. Clara surveys him as well. She stands on tip-toes, her eyes boring into every feature, head tilting this way and that, inquisitive. Her skin is too bright, her eyes too black – face too wide, but that’s an aside that dawns upon him intrusively. Unrelated. 

“I thought I’d seen them all,” she mutters, “and yet here you are. Here you all are. But he didn’t know about you, not any of it.” Her mouth settles into a small, sad line. “I thought I’d seen the worst of them, I really did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Me?” she exclaims, darting back and craning her neck to stare up into the stone recesses of the ceiling. “Nothing, don’t mind me. I’m totally mad,” she careens back on her heels, grinning. “But I do have one question” she looks at him again, a burning, black intensity in her eyes. “Just. One. Why you, John?”

“That’s not my name,” the operative replies coldly. 

“Well I’m not calling you by a number. Answer me. Why you? For me, they chose you. Why?”

His lips twist into a scowl, feigning disinterest despite his curiosity. He would very much like to know the answer. 

“Because I was the best agent for the job.”

Clara scoffs. “Yeah right. Sorry, John, but you’re not particularly discrete.” She claps, crisp, and darts away, fiddling with the controls in away that the operative knows is performative. “Wrong answer. Try again.”

The operative pauses for a moment. She’s only trying to provoke him, wind him up. Distract him from his mission. She must know that it doesn’t matter what she says. Her death is locked in. “I don’t know,” he admits, playing along. 

“Ah, there it is. Now, think about it.” At his silence, she spurs him on with a playful nudge. Her touch is like a bladepoint, proximity like a chill. “Come on, I know you’re bright, even if you are rubbish at undercover.” 

The operative stares at Clara, trying to work out what is wrong with her, what has changed. He pulls at time’s lines and asks, as they run screaming. They snake away from his grasp just as determinedly as they do from her’s, parting from his touch like electrons from a negative charge. 

“Why you,” Clara repeats, her hands clasped behind her back. With a slipping sensation, a missed step in the dark, he feels that she has taken whatever power he held at the beginning of their confrontation and repurposed it, reversed it. She is in control now, and he is the one hanging onto every word of her revelation. 

“Why. You,” she smacks her lips. “A lone kid chasing after a rogue TARDIS from a point in Gallifrey’s timeline that must be so far in his future so as to be nearly inconceivable. Why? Well,” – she steeples her fingers below her chin – “it’s because no one else could.” Idly, she skirts a hand across the TARDIS controls with a fondness unreflected, a mimicry. The ship squirms beneath her touch.

“These defences are brilliant,” Clara continues wistfully. “A good friend of mine set them up, see, and he is really, really good at stealing TARDISes. It’s pretty much his go-to move. Agents from your future have tried to reel in this ship with trawling nets and quantic blasts and cosmic fishing lines, but it never works. They’ve sent agents to break down the defences from the inside, but none of them ever could. I’ll tell you why you’re here, John, it’s because it couldn’t be anyone else.” Her voice is barely a whisper, and he hangs onto every word. “The only one that could ever take down these defences, and send this ship back to Gallifrey, is the one who set the protections up in the first place.” 

“You’re lying,” the operative snarls. Not only is it an impossibility – something he would, never,  _ ever  _ do – but it goes against the most basic tenets of Division operations. It is a paradoxical offence of the highest degree, to become embroiled in one’s own timeline. As if on queue, he feels the blackened, rotting hands of a swollen corpse close around his neck. 

“I’m really not,” Clara says, sympathetic. 

She is familiar; familiar like a childhood memory buried and clinging to the seafloor, drifting as he tries to dredge it up. A flash of sensation; bone-dust, a black sky, and an inferno above. 

“We’ve met before,” the abomination tells him. “A long, long time from now, and a very long time ago. You can see it.” 

“I can see that you’re stalling for time,” the operative replies levelly. “It’s pointless, and it’s typical, and it won’t fool me.” The operative turns his back on Clara and stares down at the console. The panelling covering the telepathic circuits is still loose, and light pulses through its metal seams like a swath of stars above a parapet, misaligned. 

“Do you even know what you are?” Clara whispers. 

“I’m a Time Lord.”

“Well, yes, I always thought so – you always did too. Maybe eventually they’ll wash away all the parts of you that made you different, and make you forget the way you began.” He can hear her pacing behind him, but her footsteps cascade, like dominos falling. Clangorous and weightful and many. “Falling through the dark,” she whispers. “Monitored, trapped, terrified.”

He sees it, as if the memories are being unearthed and weaponised, thrown back at him  _ like the balls of mud flung between rock-formation barricades on the drying clay beds, and watched, from high upon the hill as the grass began to grow in crimson tufts, and all the children grew old and died. _

“Stop it. Just shut up!” he yells, but Clara has been silent for moments, minutes. 

There are tears in her eyes. “You were right, you know, about the Time Lords. They aren’t nearly so kind.”  _ Dark stone and green vines. There’s a pistol in his pocket and blue stone beneath old knees, and Clara is crying.  _ Past and present. She shouldn’t be able to cry, frozen in time, and yet she does; silently, angrily. Stubbornly. 

“How much have they taken from you already, John?”

“Stop calling me that,” the operative spits. He steadies himself against the consoles’ edge, breathing deeply, the way he used to  _ when the liquid entered acerbic into his blood, running like breath down his throat, to his hearts, through his mind, dragging. The flames will catch soon, and he will burn, but that’s okay. That’s good. They are going to live forever.  _

His voice shakes. “I serve, for the glory of Gallifrey. No matter where I came from, it is my home now. They are my people now.”

“Of course they are. You walk their earth, breathe their air. They raised you up,” Clara says, brows knotted in anger. “They made you better. But your gift, they took it, piece by piece they drained it and they locked you up, killed you again and again and listened to the screams, siphoned it away and built a city as you slept like death, in nightmare.” Clara takes a ragged, rageful breath, despite her still lungs. It’s as if she is remembering something, calling upon an anger long buried in her mortal past. It’s sickening. 

“It’s a blur to you now,” she says, voice quickening – “repressed, like a loop, a half-remembered punishment where you were remade, over and over again, always a little different, living through the same hell as you put the pieces back together,  _ slow _ ,” she whispers. “And slower every time.” 

Clara steps forward, head lowered, gaze upward, wounding the air with each word. There is no further for him to back away, and the console edge digs into his back, repulsed. “How long were you there, in that building, on that hill, when they stopped letting you out. How many times?”

He doesn’t have the energy to retort, it’s all he can do to breathe deep, to steady himself, and look forward to the moment when this will all be scrubbed away. This is a trick, or a trap, and he will not fall for it. 

“How long were you a child? How many decades?” 

“Shut up!” he yells. The operative likes the Earth colloquialism, and the anger it holds, the finality. “How do you know that, you can’t know that, _nobody_ knows that and I’m,” he exhales, steadying himself. “I’m not that anymore.” 

“Of course,” Clara says, casually, playfully. He feels as if he is caught in a trap as it digs in, closing. “They’ve stripped it all away. It’s only an impression now. A big, sturdy fortress around the edges, holding the ground in place,” – she stops midstep – “but aren’t you curious?”

In a swift moment – perhaps only swift by comparison, because the operative feels as if time is rushing past him, rushing  _ away _ – Clara reaches out and takes his hand. From the point where their skin touches, there is an explosion. Time reels, screams, contorts as if burnt by the blast, and hides. It bends and parts around them, and like a cocoon it shields. Within, stars burst and years spin.

She is scattered, he realises, cut into a thousand pieces and sprinkled across the universe. What he sees before him is a front, a stencil shape. The woman in the blue dress is a two-dimensional projection cast by something that he cannot see, and it’s behind the walls, infesting the woodworks, scratching at the plaster and slinking pestilent through the pipes. There is something with her, that is her; chasing, or being chased. Teeth or tail. And she is a part of  _ him _ , somehow, embroiled in past and future and all its potentialities like a constant companion. 

Her eyes swim with sparks and snaps of indigo through a pale sky. He stares up at it, falls into it, headlong into the dark where old nightmares wait. 

Here, in the schism, something golden glitters. 

“What are you?” he asks, as he jerks his hand away from her grip, too late. 

Clara shrugs. “To tell you the truth, John, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.” She gives him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “That makes two of us.” 

In his haste to retreat, the operative stumbles, but smoothes over the action by straightening the lapels of his jacket. “It’s too late,” he tells Clara, “and if you’re trying to persuade me to turn this ship around, I can’t. I wouldn’t, even if I could.”

“Funny you should mention it, I wasn’t even going to ask.” She grins; jaunted and pointed. “But you’re right. Why should you trust me?”

The operative clasps his hands behind his back, regaining control, composure. He wipes his face of weakness, and his eyes of fear. “What happened in the past doesn’t matter,” he says. Not his true name, nor his true face, wherever they lurk in the blackness above. “It’s over now, and the planet is safe. Its people are safe.” But he can feel the pain of it magnified,  _ the loneliness, and the darkness of the laboratory at night when the starlight trickled feebly through the windows and the machines hummed like beasts in the dark. _

Clara smiles. “An admirable attitude.” She is still looking at him like she’s won, and her sarcasm cuts. “Your sacrifices were very noble, and I’m sure they’re all very proud.” Not long now, not much more to endure. He can feel the pull of the Matrix, larger than any system he has ever encountered, or has been permitted to remember encountering. Expansive; its knowledge beckons. 

Clara slides down the stair railing with a swish and a squeak, and lands upon the lower level, pacing past bookshelves. She runs her fingertips along their spines and says, in a singsong tone, “I’m sure the universe will sing your praises, and worship the empire they built with your blood as mortar,” – she clucks her tongue idly – “and your bones as bricks.” 

The operative shivers. “Clara Oswald –” 

“Please, call me Oswin.”

His voice shakes. “We will be arriving on Gallifrey shortly.” He can feel it, and he can feel how very wrong it is; expansive, yes, but wild, like a garden overgrown with thistle and thorn. Tilted on its axis, and spun round, like a reflected face. 

“Yes, yes we will. But you might want to have a look at those coordinates.” Clara points idly toward the console monitor. “I might not be able to read them, but I know what they’ll tell you.”

The operative turns and studies the coordinates that flash upon the screen, white and blaring and attention-grabbing. Behind them, red lights pulse, and the ship cries a warning beneath his feet. The runes shift and glitch, oscillating between impossible, indecipherable combinations as the screen attempts to render the impossible. “But – but that’s…”

“Impossible?” Clara offers unhelpfully.

“We’re leaving the universe. How are we leaving the universe? The ship was on course to Gallifrey!”

“And it still is,” Clara shrugs. “Change of address.” 

“No, but this – this doesn’t make sense,” the operative mutters. “These aren’t coordinates, they don’t  _ mean  _ anything. We’re not anywhere.” The ship drags its feet and moans, sickened by the path ahead. It doesn’t like this place. “Outside of time, and space,” the operative whispers to himself, then turns to Clara. “Why is Gallifrey out here?” 

“Well, basically,” Clara says, still pacing by the bookshelves in skips and jumps, “they were really, really scared.” 

Sure enough, here in this isolated pocket of reality, a planet pushes forth a feeble, dying signal. It is nothing to the euphoric psychic zenith that sings across the Division’s navigation systems, anchoring their every move to home, connecting every soldier. It is a dull lament, and almost inaudible. It cries in pain, and emptiness, and grief. The operative shuts his eyes. He hears Clara walk back up the stairs, slow. 

“This is where Gallifrey ends up, long past the age of the Division,” Clara explains in a sombre, sympathetic tone. “Even the CIA is just a glorified local police force nowadays. The Matrix is an old, dying thing, that goes on, growing wild and angry, laboriously churning out superstitious prophecy after prophecy, and the people cling to them like lifelines.” Her voice trails to a whisper, and the operative keeps his eyes shut. “Those stories are all they have. Old legends, recycled. They’ve been there since the beginning. But you’d know all about that.” 

The ship gives a final groan, and the operative’s hearts a final lurch, as the TARDIS lands upon the red planet in the middle of the void. Dully, the lights flicker a warning red. 

“We’ve arrived.” Clara gazes importantly over the operative’s shoulder, and he turns to the window behind him. 

A porthole view of featureless orange. The line between sky and sands is blurred, indistinguishable save the hazy rock formations shimmering in a silver, gaseous haze on the horizon.

“Something’s gone wrong,” he says dryly, staring at the wasteland. “This isn’t the right place.”

“It is.” There is nothing playful about Clara’s tone now, nothing vindictive. There is only pity. Despite her short-cut dress with its crisp white pinafore, her bouncing ponytail and cartoonish eyes, she looks old. As old and withered as the desert beyond the porthole, still and unyielding as the void beyond the starless sky. 

“I’m sorry John, but it is.” 

He walks down the steps and over to the window, looking out upon the familiar landscape. This is the way the Gallifrey used to look, long ago, before it was given the name. This is the Gallifrey he stepped out upon when the doctor’s ship landed, the dying sands that he felt beneath his feet. The air, plagued by heat and disease, its very molecules sick. Its people hopeless. 

This is Gallifrey, before it was saved, before the grasses grew back and the cloud cover thickened in marmalade tufts across the pale sky; before the rains fell, and the silver lakes filled, and the snow layered itself in soft blankets over the mountain peaks, sifting in sloughs through grey leaves that shined in the muted suns. This world is dead. It is old, impossibly old, so old that it has outlived time itself, and turned its back. He feels his breath speeding up, hearts hammering, after everything he  _ gave –  _

“What happened?” he asks, swallowing thickly, his jaw tense and his eyes burning. 

Clara smiles a thin, grim line. “War.”

Sensation is worming its way through his bones, old pain. There are sinkholes opening beneath the fortress.

“Come along John. We have work to do.” Clara says gently, wrapping a careful hand around his jacket sleeve. The Operative watches their faint reflections in the window glass. Something ties them together, like red thread, or desert grass. “There are some people here that I’ve been waiting a very, very long time to see again, and I’d like to have a word. Wouldn’t you?”

The operative jerks his arm out of her grasp, and turns away from the window. He holds his head high, and walks away. “Nothing has changed. I’ll deliver you to the citadel, and you will be returned to your time of death. The controls are locked. There is nowhere to run.”

“Yes, I know, and your lot will set about fixing all the timelines I’ve bungled across the universe – good luck with that, by the way.” She shows no hint of resistance or regret – in fact, she seems to be enjoying herself. 

Clara springs past him, dashing around the edge of the console room. “The citadel is a bit of a walk, I’m afraid. Defences and all that.” Her voice echoes a thousandfold. 

She stops by the door, frowning at it. There are no chequered tiles plating the threshold, and the door is now a plain, silver oval. She turns, expression mutinous. “You got rid of my diner!” 

His features knot in exasperation. “I rest your systems.”

“I liked that diner,” she laments, disparaging. “I was keeping things in there – what happened to all the frozen chips?”

“Scattered to the time winds,” the operative shrugs, “burnt to nothing.”

“Right, okay,” – she pats down the front of her pinafore. “Lovely. Good to know.” He can’t tell if she’s nervous, stalling, or trying to cheer him up. Whichever it is, it isn’t working. He can feel the desolation of this place like a bruise, pressed upon. A full-body ache. His knuckles throb, and he flexes them into fists at his sides as he walks toward the exit. 

Best not to think about it, and go along. Soon it will be forgotten, like a bad dream. 

With one final look at the operative, Clara opens the TARDIS doors and says, “do me a favour, John. Make sure you watch closely –” For a moment, she stares, and he stops, and brown eyes of a thousand slightly different shades reflect kaleidoscopic in her own. “ – and do as you’re told.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok ok ok, so. Chapter notes, I’ve gottem, because this one is loonnnnng.  
> First, I realise that this chapter is mostly just a series of long conversations, but we’ve got 4 egomaniacs that just won’t shut up, it isn’t my fault.  
> I like to think that the Clara echo thing occurred often enough for it to become a legend totally divorced from the Doctor, because it’s funny. You might then wonder how it was that 11 never figured out who clara was despite trying to find out throughout s7b. The answer is that he’s just really, really bad at research. He probably doesn’t have the patience. (Also spot the Arkane references in the echo section)  
> As for Missy, she has a reason for being here, I swear. Also they had adventures after Clara died because I say so, which was the subject of a story I never wrote.  
> The Doctor was playing Burning the Midnight Lamp by Jimi Hendrix, because the lyrics are a ridiculously good fit (particularly for Heaven Sent)??  
> Also, Hendrix said about the song, “I think everyone can understand the feeling when you’re travelling that no matter what your address there is no place you can call home. The feeling of a man in a little old house in the middle of a desert where he is burning the midnight lamp.” And I’m like excuse me DoCtOR wHAT?  
> And we stan the Shelleys  
> I did rewatch Hell Bent yesterday and saw that there is really no time for the scenes I’ve written to happen since we pretty much see them run from the extraction chamber to the lift to the matrix, but I had forgotten it so it didn’t happen. And I’m addicted to trippy dream things.  
> I am aware that the last part of the flashback doesn’t make sense, and originally I was going to just write the conversation that Clara and the Doctor had in the Cloisters word for word, but I love the mystery of it. Anything I said would be insufficient :/ so I sprinkled.  
> She does tell him she loves him, though, because whouffaldi  
> But yeah, I have it as a weird half-flashback instead that is technically atrocious, probably, but blah blah time runs thin we can get away with smooshing tenses.  
> Not much to say on the last part :/ rip 2 John I guess.


	6. Remember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A kindness, a funeral, and a question

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaaaaaaaaaa it. is. FINISHED  
> (and now I just have to edit the whole thing again because I knowwww I didn't do a good job as I went, so it's still a work in progress but let me have this)  
> also there is an epilogue to come (more words, I know) I'll upload it as soon as I edit it.

**[REDACTED], The Time of Empires, 70 BA**

The sister sits in the dark and listens to the smoke. 

She is alone in the chamber, its myriad torches extinguished to lend spiritual focus to the central pyre; a copper dish piled high with dry desert nettles and thick oils. A stubborn flame crackles at its core that wafts black trails of smoke up into the recesses of the domed marble ceiling. 

Klara repeats the words, relaying them in the tune of the ancient songs. There is more to the ritual then memory, an altered state she often has difficulty calling forth. With all the focus she can muster, she asks the smoke to show her truth, a glimpse of the impending future. The vision of it has come to many, everyone from the Priestesses to the most effectual and volatile of the Silents. Even the initiates, new to their ways, can sense cataclysm looming on the horizon. This impending future threatens to extinguish every star in the sky, to kill every watchful God. First, despite her amateur abilities, it came to her. 

In the beginning, the visions were vivid, sporadic things; a flash of consuming darkness, a golden, humming light, vehicles of metal barrelling through the blackness of space and blossoming into flame. They came to her in dreams, woken from abruptly in sweat and panic. In time, the other sisters of their order – the Pythia – began to have similar visions, not only in dreams but in the trails of smoke from which they read prophecy, between the lines of fire. The truth is pushing in upon them, terrifying, from all sides, and they are powerless to stop it. 

_Show me the end._ Klara asks the flame. 

There is an art to reading the flames. Klara has been taught to hone this skill since she was a child, brought to the temple for her gifts. Children with an open mind, able to sense and relay messages from beyond, are brought to this place to serve the sisterhood, and rule in wisdom over the dwindling population of the world. 

The smoke remains silent. Klara presses her eyes shut and welcomes the familiar wave of deep, listless concentration that incites prophecy, opening her mind. She splays her hands and places her palms upon the cold marble beneath, reaching into the heart of the mountain. 

The convent of the Pythia was built upon the mountain many hundreds of thousands of years ago – perhaps even longer, some say, back when the years had no meaning, and time was as fluid and changing as the wind. Its twisted black spires reach into the orange skies and watch over the vast desert planes. Harsh orange sands sweep its surface, and nothing grows but tangled thickets upon the damper patches of soil where, deep beneath, groundwater trickles thick and claylike, drying up by the day. The world is sick. The world is dying. Their Gods watch, but they do not lift a finger. Their people betrayed them long ago. 

The Pythia are the keepers of knowledge, contained within the fire that brews beneath the earth in wells of heat across the land. They live to observe, to preside, to grow wisened and ripened upon the fruits of foreknowledge, and to rule. 

With the apocalyptic visions that have presented themselves to the Pythia, all have been captured by a sense of existential and spiritual urgency. Their neighbouring temples, many thousands of miles away, have been alerted of the disturbance through their powerful currents of telepathic communication. The mountain is trying to warn them all, with more unanimity and urgency than ever a warning has come before. There was no need to search for it, to extrapolate shard of truth between contradicting interpretations and hazy lines of fate like so many other future perils glimpsed, lurking so very far into the black future; hybridised monsters and great, arachnid webs as large as the universe itself. What they see now is no glimpsed fancy, passed down through the generations and devolved to legend. It is clear, and the truth presents itself to any mind open enough to listen; a machine is coming, and it will destroy the universe, bend it to its corrupt, scientific will, and it will bring war. It will bring grief, and destruction, and, finally, the end of all things. 

_Show me_. Klara begs the mountain. She is beginning to grow impatient, which is precisely the reason she has never been a skilled reader of the flames. This forsworn future must not come to pass. Klara communicates her incumbent belief in this fact, and in her question. 

_How can it be stopped?_ Which threads of fate must be tugged, how far and how tight? How must the course be directed, the public consciousness shaped and spread and _moved?_

Klara stares into the fire and lets the light sting her eyes in streaks of toxic yellow and sky orange. With her mind she reaches in, searches, one hand over the other, climbing the chain up and up and _forward_. 

A familiar image: darkness encroaching as the stars flicker out, a red desert in the black of night, and figures in drab red robes, and a web of silver, mercury links flowing stream-like, and a fiery planet like a spider at its centre, spinning, smiling, striking. She has seen these images before – all members of the sisterhood have. They are like a rite of passage, the most basic, surface-level readings of fate. With a twist of anger through the timbre of her calm, she presses on. 

A new image: purple light crackling above a sharp, two-tined spire, and a child dressed in yellow and grey staring up, the light reflected in its dark eyes. 

There is someone with her in the marble chamber. Reading the flames is a sacred exercise, and to interrupt is an act of the highest disrespect. But Klara knows in her bones that it is not a person that lurks in the shadows that gather in the corners of the expansive chamber. A being hovers above like a canopy, coating the marble domes and beginning to spread downwards in a seeping sheet of thought. Part of her expects the flames to be extinguished by the gathering dark, though she knows that this is impossible. All fire in the temple burns in perpetuity. Klara flinches, and struggles to keep her palms pressed upon the floor, and her mind connected to the thing that has manifested around her – whether unmasked or called forth. It feels fundamentally opposite to everything Klara has learnt to recognise and pluck from the expanse of knowledge, and yet, when its breadth reaches the base of the firepit, the flames tear and streak, twisting further toward the ceiling in tendrils of renewed, vigorous light. 

Klara feels the ground rumble beneath her outstretched fingers. 

She must have been wrong. There is another explanation for the unease she felt; a child’s terror at the approach of something truly divine. Recognising its power, and its oneness with the fire, she bows her head toward the stone, and searches for its voice. 

For the first time in her life, and indeed, in the lives of any living Pythia in the convent, the fire speaks. 

_You ask the wrong question, child._ It booms from above her throat, behind her teeth, making them chatter. Her fingers tense, arched like claws against the stone. 

It takes her a great deal of courage to answer. 

“Then what is the right question?” Klara speaks the words to the curling smoke. Aloud, it is a weak whisper, in her mind, a clear and open call. In the old stories, all the Gods have voices, but it is said that they lost the ability, or the patience, long ago. Some say that people simply lost the skill to listen. Klara knows that it is the mountain itself that conjures the voice from the way that the marble floor shudders with every word within her mind, and the way that the flames sprawl to mimic its tone, sending embers up into the domed dark like spittle from its mouth. It explains the deep terror she felt as it descended upon the chamber; a sublime wave of dread.

_Not so fast. We have much to discuss, I do believe._

“What do you wish to know?” Is there some honorific she should be using, when addressing a God? The mountain has never been so bold, so deliberate. To read the flames is to master subtly, to glean one’s own interpretation from the chaos. Perhaps the end of days has persuaded it to be more straightforward in its guidance. 

_It is very young here. Can you feel it? The rules barely hold so far back. Paradox is a word without meaning – can you taste the chaos in the air? The universe is barely walking._

“It is all soon to end, as you have shown me.”

_And who do you believe that I am?_

Perhaps it is a trick question, meant to test her faith, her cleverness. “You are the mountain. You hold the flames of prophecy, as do so many other buried Gods across the lands. You give wisdom. You guide us.”

_Yes, that will do. How does the old tale go again? The Gods once walked the land as shadows, beings of magic and power. And people rose among them in a new age, hybrids of flesh as the age of shadows faded. The new creatures angered the Gods, and in their disdain, they fled to the sky._

“But some remained.” Klara finishes the tale. “To guide.” 

_A lovely story,_ the mountain says, though there is a sneer in his tone. _Awfully simplistic._ The truth, Klara knows, is far stranger and more complex. The details, the mechanics of those times are not for them to know, and the neatness of the tale gets the story across well enough. The moral is what matters. The mistakes of the past must never be repeated. There was once a great age of shadows and magic, and that age ended. Now, they are abandoned, and even the meagre vestiges of the old magic decays. 

_In the future, they will call this the Time of Empires, when factions rose and fell, scrambling sense from the belligerent, lingering chaos of the preceding age,”_ says the mountain. 

“Then there will be ages to follow, despite what we have been shown?”

 _Yes, I believe there will, if we act in haste._ It is strange, the personable way in which it speaks does not befit itself to all Klara has come to believe about the enmity and elusiveness of the Gods. Still, she cannot presume to know these things. Its power is unarguable, and its connection with the fire absolute. She can feel its reserves boiling deep beneath the earth. The heat powerful enough to burn away minds. 

“Am I correct,” she asks, “in my assurance?”

 _For our purposes, yes._ The smoke seems to smile, to press upon her feelings of confidence and calm. _You are correct._

“Then…” Klara hesitates. This is all wrong. No, not wrong, new. In this place, any change other than the steady, inevitable degradation of all things is so atypical that it instils in her a feeling of discomfort.

“What is the right question?” she asks. 

_Try, how does it begin?_

Obediently, Klara asks, “How does it begin?” She wants to ask about the tower and the purple light; about the verdant fields surrounding, unlike any she has ever seen upon this desolate planet. 

In her delirium, the flames form an eye, and it looks at her in a conspiratorial manner. The stone beneath hums a similar note of the clandestine. 

_With a child._

Once Klara’s consultation with the flames comes to a close, she wipes the soot-stained sweat from her skin, which has settled in a dark coating over the cyclic tattoos inked into her flesh, and leaves the darkened chamber. She bows her head at the guards outside the chamber, her veil once again draped over her face. The Pythia are of one mind, blank receivers of the Gods’ wisdom. Individuality is revoked in their service, scrubbed clean from the children that are delivered to the convent steps. It comes as a consequence of keeping one’s mind wedged open for so long. The order is like a hive, a single being – at least, that is what it strives to be in its purest form. One mind composed of many, which hones and extends the natural telepathic gifts of its constituents. 

The mountain’s instructions linger in her mind. Perhaps it is more than an echo. It feels as if a piece of it remains within her, speaking between her waking thoughts. 

_There is a child with an incredible gift. By its hand, an empire will rise._

Klara makes her way to the courtyard, hands folded at her front in a ravel of heavy fabric, caught crimson by the streaks of sunlight that intrude through the crevices in the old stone walls. The convent crumbles in its old age. It stood for an unfathomable stretch of time unmaintained, but now the storms batter, the sun beats, the old building falls to the elements and to the brutal passage of time. 

In the centre of the courtyard, the High Priestess is waiting. 

Klara must report what she has found directly. She cannot wait for echoes of the news to reach their leader through the slow, osmotic translation of their shared consciousness. She spoke to a God. That is not something to be kept to oneself. 

Those she meets in the halls sense her urgency despite her slow, respectable pace, and make way for her passage. 

_The empire will reign absolute, in terror and tyranny. It will cage the Gods, subjugate them, and in doing so destroy what little of the old magic still lingers in this broken age._

The High Priestess sits at the centre of the courtyard upon a chipped stone dais decorated with woven mats and crocheted cushions, their once vibrant fabrics faded beneath the unrelenting suns. She is surrounded by her closest disciples, veiled sisters of lower caste, some unmasked, their tattoos, black and silver, adorning skin of all shades. The tiled stone beneath is cracked, its once polished reds and golds now leeched to pinks and pale yellows, their intricate mosaics and etchings long lost to the suns’ bite.

Dried plants snake in tangles of spiked, brown creepers around chipped sandstone pillars, their bases littered with offerings of dust and ceramic spalls. And above, the black towers of the convent loom, casting sharp shadows over the central square. From the eaves, twigs hang and sway in the lofty breeze, pattering against the heat-scorched windows, blackened and stained with the vestiges of old colour. Rows of crimson-robed sisters walk slowly along the corridors that ring the yard, in pairs and single-file congregations, but rarely alone.

There are young girls sitting upon the half-walls and the raised plateaus scattered around the courtyard, between the thistles and bent, edificial cacti, great tomes open in their arms. If a stranger were to walk upon the scene – and though this does happen, it is an increasingly rare occurrence – they might find it preternaturally quiet. This is because outsiders do not listen carefully enough, with their simple ears and base concentration. In reality – their reality – the air is alive with noise. It passes through minds and between nerves in clasped hands, and chimes sweet and clangourous from the tower bells that knell to mark the time, and mourn the past. It whispers and yells, swells in the heat, to drown the drivel of clicking insects and squalling birds. It panics, and perhaps that is all an outsider would hear, whispering between the walls. Panic, and despair for all the lives not yet lost, of flesh and stars. 

_The empire will war. You have seen the outcome; a blackness that consumes all things, the death of a billion, billion worlds. The end of everything._

Klara positions herself in the line of hopeful disciples, eager to share all she has learned. She presses urgency upon those around her, gently knocking upon their walls, and passing parcels. A voice, clear and direct and deep. A waking shadow, a way forward. Slowly the crowd peters from her path, and leaves nothing but cracked marble between Klara and the shrivelled High Priestess. The sisters by her sides, of higher rank, look down at her in scornful curiosity, carefully guarded. The hierarchy of their order is afforded by both skill and age, a mastery of both affords a finer quality of dress, a new layer of intricate tattoos, and a room within the best-preserved wings of the convent. 

The veil of the High Priestess is drawn back, revealing a face sun-burnt to leathered brown, old ink layered over faded designs, giving her skin a smudged, dark aspect. Black eyes stare beneath hooded, drooping lids, and a smile twists lipless and wry above an indistinct, loose chin. 

“Come forward, sister,” says the High Priestess. Her voice quivers and bends, like an old, thin tree in a soft desert wind. Klara steps forwards and bows her head in respect. 

“I looked into the smoke moments ago, Priestess,” Klara tells her. It is polite to begin conversations of such gravitas with words. 

“More doom, is it?” the Priestess’ mouth shudders into a smile. “Every day that is what my sisters show me, and I grow ill upon a diet of terror. Some good news, I hope?” She glances at the disciples surrounding her, positioned in absent activity. “Some nicer weather perhaps? A spot of rain, a bountiful harvest, a live birth? No?” The Priestess senses Klara’s fear. “Very well,” she resigns, and lays her inked hands upon her lap. The tattoos hang formless upon folds of weathered skin. 

“The mountain spoke to me, in a voice clear as yours, in words just as plain,” Klara relays and, with the customary knock and exchange of greeting, she enters the antechamber of the old woman’s mind, and shows her all that was said, preserved in her crystalline memory. 

_The child is hidden in the village below the mountain, in an abandoned facility where they practise the rotten sciences that angered the Gods in times long past, and drove them away, to let this world wither and die._

With words and mind, Klara tells her story, and from the High Priestess it is spread, like an infection. When it is finished, the women in the courtyard, young and old, open their eyes and blink at the sunlit day. The marble communion chamber fades, as does the scent of pungent smoke, and old secrets. The presence of the mountain does not, and it bears heavy upon Klara’s chest. 

“This is… unprecedented,” says the High Priestess. 

The air shifts, the genial nature of the old woman striped away like dried bark. Beneath, a hardened resolve. 

“We must act upon this at once,” she commands. Across the square, the phosphor points of every mind flares bright, and their attached figures raise their heads in attention. News permeates like a grim wavefront. Eyes beneath veils and naked before the sky turn, and drink, and cling to the sliver of hope afforded by the God that has, after so many years, elected to speak. Chatter is kicked up by rising bodies like dust underfoot, whispers both physical and silent. 

“Gather the Priestesses, rouse the Silents – our most skilled readers must consult the fire with haste, before its voice fades.” 

If there is suspicion among those who obey the call to action, it is kept well hidden, but the glaring truth of the matter is simple: Gods do not speak. Gods have not spoken for thousands of years, perhaps never spoke at all, and this is known as innately as the existence of the sky’s twin suns. In Klara’s case, her suspicion, a feeling that lurches dangerously toward fear, is hidden expertly, wrapped in layer upon layer of red cloth and thick smoke and piled earth. She felt something when the mountain addressed her, beyond the deep cadence of its voice behind her teeth. Behind reverence, she was afraid, in the deep, unchangeable, instinctual way that one is afraid of the dark, or of death. 

But the solution the mountain has impressed upon them is so very clear, so very simple. 

_In truth, it is a creature, not a child, but a monster. An evil thing._

She wonders if it is the child she saw in her vision, beneath the purple light. If so, she doesn’t look like a monster. 

Soon, the square is alive with movement, the Priestesses by their leader's side take her gently by the arms and lead the matriarch down from her central plinth. Books are shut, skirts are lifted, minds are cleared in preparation using rituals taught from childhood. Conjuring emptiness behind the eyes, which Klara has never been particularly good at. In truth, Klara has never been particularly good at reading the flames, either. Generally it is an activity that brings her great frustration, as unwanted thoughts wander across her path, obscuring any small truths she might otherwise glimpse. Her thoughts cloud her judgment, tint the flames. Rationally, the question remains; why was she able to hear the mountain’s voice at all? 

_There is only one way to stop the visions I have shown you from coming to pass._

The Silents are herded from their dark cells cut into the face of the mountain, moving hunched and stilted and strange. Psychic turmoil leaks from their forms and scuds across the surface of the surrounding minds like dark clouds. They cannot speak, hence the name, though it has always struck Klara as an odd choice. They can still scream. 

Her fellow sisters will likely expect Klara to join the communion, given that she was the one who uncovered the voice in the smoke, but she can’t quite bury her suspicion. She knows that voice, she _remembers_ it. 

That’s the tricky thing about this place, swimming in its soup of memories and history left behind like residue, like stains upon the subspace; you can never be sure if a memory is your own. 

_You must find the creature, and destroy it._

Destruction is not something that benevolence requests, especially not the destruction of a child, though her humble opinion on the subject hardly matters. 

Klara was brought to the convent as a young child, recognised in her youth for the unique gifts she possessed. Certain people in the world are born with telepathic abilities far more potent than the rest. Their abilities are dangerous, for themselves and others if not honed, shaped, directed to serve a greater purpose. Thoughts can be shared through touch, and through attention. It is something often explored in youth, as Klara herself did amongst the other children. Despite the taboo parents use to warn their children, touting old stories of the danger in crossing minds, in delving too deeply and becoming lost, children always push the limits. Klara did so with the curl of hand around a wrist, a gentle touch, a pointed kick. There are children from which such energies flow like water from a spout, and others for whom it lays dormant, only to flood from them in toxic torrents upon the brush of some momentous, triggering event. Envoys of the Pythia sense the potential lurking in such children, and they are, by request or decision or force, brought to convents such as theirs. In Klara’s case, as is most common, her parents brought her willingly and with honour. They were compensated, relieved of a child both gifted and cursed, and Klara never saw them again. 

But the sisterhood is not suited to everyone. Some, when their minds are unhinged, lose the ability to close them again. The Silents have empty minds. The ether of experience rushes through their ears and the empty space between them like wind through an empty cavern. They are conduits, power sources used to bolster the signal of intent minds, those retaining will with which to search, and reasoning with which to decipher. 

The Silents scare Klara, in fact, they scare everyone, and that fear is threaded through the shared consciousness of the sisterhood. They are powerful and volatile and barely controlled, and they are only brought out into the sunlight on special occasions, to be pummelled with the wealth of sensation lurking beyond their insulated stone walls. Their cells protect them from the psyche of the population, the dying planet, the few surviving animals. Klara watches one of the Silents stumble as it walks. Its dark hair is short and matted, and the tattoos on its face are faint and crude. A child’s initiatory tattoos stretched upon a woman’s face. It has been in the dark for a long time. 

The line of prisoners is unchained, there is no sense in restraining them. They are led witless by the noise of safety and protection, manufactured ahead of them like a beacon, guiding them like rails beneath their feet. 

Klara wanders to the edge of the emptying courtyard. Some remain; the initiates, along with the servants and guards and the few officials that lurk idly in the courtyard. Male children with telepathic potential are general consigned to the latter roles, though some females are as well depending on their skills. It is not clear where the tradition began, but it is tradition nonetheless, and honoured as such.

Klara rests her elbows on the balcony railing at the edge of the yard, the stone surface eroding molecularly in wake of the scarce pressure she places upon it. At a touch, she thinks, the world will come apart. 

The darkness flashes across her mind; the warships and screaming children and crumbling planets. Doom, fast approaching unless they act. All the nightmares ever shared, and cautionary tales told, will come to pass unless they do as the mountain instructs. 

What is the alternative, she wonders, to the end they have all witnessed? Without a powerful empire to lift its people from squalor, this world will surely die. 

The sky is pale and cloudless, the suns sweltering hot. Over the edge of the plateau, in the canyon valleys beyond, the dotted shacks and huts and tarpaulins of the village are visible. Its population is dwindling, and out across the vast desert, countless other settlements go empty. Forsaken places devoid of life, blackened wood struck down by electric storms and flash fires. Other towns sit whole and abandoned, doors marked with dark crosses, microcosmic populations taken in weeks by plague. Villages starving, whether through famine or time, children unborn for generations until the elderly and infirm were left unable to fend for the rest. 

This fate looms over the entire world, from the ruins of the shadow cities where practitioners of old arts grow old, and give up, to the new villages that sprung up far from the tainted lands as the curse that ails the world descended from the stars. 

Perhaps it is a choice between spectacle, death and loss on a universal scale – a death in war and fire – or a slow, undignified fading into obscurity. Perhaps the mountain will save them all, if they do as it says. The choice is easy: the needs of the many or the needs of the few. Of all the stelliferous Gods and worlds to be born, the fading of one desert world that had its time in the shadow of old benefactors long ago, is inconsequential. Surely the life of one monster is worth even less. 

From the convent’s place upon the summit, the edge of the plain is visible, an outcrop giving way to a dusty valley, in which nestles the tired village over which their small temple rules. The spire of the facility upon the hill, where the monster resides, pokes over the edge of the cliff as if in challenge. 

Action is taken by the Pythian order, one following another at an unprecedented pace. Ordinarily, action is a potential thing, lurking in the hazy realm of soon, but never taken, and in the rare event of its enactment, there is generally a perfunctory round of slow, laborious debate between advisors and Priestesses and the higher-ranking officials representing their order in larger temples across the globe. But the old power structures are fading, the rungs of power and the necessary bureaucratic steps needed to jump between them have been left by the wayside. In times of strife, factions have split from the focused whole, their contradictory beliefs flowering into disagreement, and then to conflict. Their order is divided in a way they have not been since before the curse befell the world, and they were forced to form a united front. 

The mountain spoke to the High Priestess, and in turn to all with the will to listen. The phenomena that Klara witnessed was repeated, though from the imprint that the experience left on her sisters, Klara notes one novel distinction. The voice’s playful nature, the way it toyed with her in its personable way, was not present when it spoke to the others. The mountain addressed the masses with all the polite, inscrutable benevolence that one would expect from a God. Nevertheless, its instructions are clear, and its intent unanimously agreed upon without the usual need for multiple interpretations to be considered. 

Decisions are made quickly, in haste and desperation. Whether guided by pure fear, or the mountain’s hand, there is no opposition. There is no discussion of morality. 

All this is done without Klara’s input. She is not of high enough rank, and knows her ill-informed opinions are of no worth, despite their clamouring potency. A partnership returns, an equality between Gods and men not heard of since ancient times. This simple act in preventing the glimpsed future will gain them the favour of the higher temples, perhaps any resources they can spare, and their finest readers. This mountain, a lesser god, may come to be revered more highly by the Pythia and their devoted. Perhaps this is why it spoke. 

It does not explain its wry nature, nor why it would choose, over so many of higher rank and skill, to speak to her first of all. To continue to speak to her, when the others receive its guidance only when they seek the flames. It is as if a piece of it rides with her, and continues to whisper while, around the convent, preparations are made for an excursion down the village below to do its bidding. 

There are supplies to be gathered, carriages to be readied, weapons to be sharpened. Plenty for Klara to busy herself with. She helps, despite her apprehension. The Priestesses continue to monitor the flames and languish in the courtyard and inner chambers of the convent, the rooms draped with white linens and soft, dyed carpets. 

Most of the sisters will remain in the convent. They do not expect resistance.

Guards will accompany a small group of sisters who will seek the child out. By the mountain’s guidance, they have learned to sense it, and the voice was right, it is powerful. A presence like a stalwart flame, burning against the canyon’s breast. They will seek it out and deliver it to the guards. They will bring it back to the convent before it is killed, like an offering upon the altar of their newly vocal God. 

Monster, not child, Klara tells herself. 

The mountain has not shown them the creature’s face, presumably because it would look too much like a real child. It warns them not to be fooled, that the truth is clear, the creature’s twisted nature is clear. The blackest of evil, the most twisted of hearts. Even Klara, with her guarded suspicions, cannot deny this; staring into the essence that lurks in the valley, she sees only hatred and anger, though whether from present or potential future, she does not know. _Time is tangled here,_ the mountain tells her.

There are certain things that it only says to her, but she cannot fathom why. 

Every night, it reveals more and more. 

_You have no idea how very deeply I had to dig to uncover this place._

Klara isn’t sure whether the dreams contain an imprint, enacted once and then repeated every few nights when sleep takes her quietly, or if the old God is simply repeating itself, unsure of what to say. Her suspicion only grows. 

_This is the very first species to evolve in this way. Gangling, naked, bipedal things. A fluke of nature, not particularly optimised or efficient, but just you watch – you are trendsetters, on this planet. Imitation is the highest form of praise, as they say._

Many of its words elude her, as if plucked from a far distant language.

_It is lonely work, you understand. You would understand, if you could remember._

In her dreams she drifts through a dark place. A room of polished metal, where the walls are too far away to see. She walks, and the floor echoes, and she knows how very new she is. Thirty-three sunrises. She was born in the palace courtyard from nothing at all. 

_The sorry game is almost over now. The final shard, clung upon the stem, shed at the very bottom of the abyss._

It addresses her almost as one would a friend.

She cannot make sense of it and does not have to. She never remembers the dreams when she wakes up. 

The night of their expedition is cold and clear, as sure as their purpose, and sharp as the blade fastened upon Klara’s hip. A band of sisters accompany an escort of guards and a pair of ambassadors – the public face of their order, and the only ones permitted to communicate with people from the outside world. A man and a woman in dark red, high-collared coats embroidered with gold and lime green in cresting waves at the throat. The party travels by night, not because they fear being seen, but because it is tradition. Scouring the populace for potentials not offered willingly, seeking essences hidden that might, in their potential futures glimpse, spell trouble for the world if left without guidance. Volatile children simply not known about, or actively hidden. The latter is rare; the population is under the thrall of their order, from the veins that snake in stone caverns – root-like – beneath the soil and toward the canyon. The similar telepathic tendrils that spill from every similar temple across the planet, strategically placed by enlightened forebearers long dead, their strategy itself long forgotten. 

They make the first part of the descent on foot, since the summit of the mountain path is too treacherous and irregular for their carriages. The way is led by one of their guards, who holds a crimson oil lamp that casts the broken path and harsh rock formations in a red glow. Torches are set along the path, affixed in dark sconces to half-dilapidated stone forts; red jewels flickering against the deep night. 

The carriages wait at a waystation halfway down the climb in a small fortress of robust stone, its parapets chipped and passages caved in. It rings a gravel courtyard upon an excavated plateau. Here, they refuel their lanterns, catch their breath, listen to the gentle, listless thoughts of the sleeping staff members. 

The party is split over two carriages. The vehicles are fashioned from black-coated metal, ornate and twisted into curls and sharp metallic licks. The engine is small and soot-choked, and as they set off the starry night is cloaked in the twin streams that scud and merge, a pall hanging over their path. A dark cloud approaching the village. 

Klara has only travelled to the village once before, in a routine wander through the marketplace. By escort of an ambassador and guard – though there is no concern of their safety, given the reverence afforded to them – they walk among the locals on the pretence of a simple outing. The ambassador might preach, if they so desire, if the public is growing restless on the curb of some new devastation – a viral strain, a ruthless summer, a measly harvest – but for the most part the purpose of such excursions is surveillance. So much can be learned from the writing, maggoty mass of people as their minds merge and mix, and deluge. It is like a feast. More importantly, it is the quickest way to understand the populace that their order serves, and must organise, must comfort and guide like parents to children who have misbehaved, and now must be kept in line. The marketplace is the quickest way to gain a breadth of opinions; all ages, from the elderly, callous-fingered artisans pawning their wares, to the scrappy, half-starved children that run between the stalls, skiving goods and disappearing into the throng of leather and sweat and dust. It was an exhausting affair, to absorb their thoughts, to parse them into anything that made sense, that could be used. It made Klara thankful of the relative quiet of the convent, of minds like sieves, empty of intent and guarded with strong walls. It made her thankful that she was taken to the convent so young. If she had remained, the cacophony may well have driven her mad. 

The path winds the long way around the canyon, a winding decline set into the cliffside. Her evening meal is kicked around in her stomach with every lurch of her carriage. Its wheels churn gravel and skate over sharp stones, and Klara clenches her teeth to stop them from rattling. It is clear that the carriages are a relic of a different time, when roads were smooth and coated with tarmac. Now they have been left for the dust and eroding cliffs to claim. 

The facility where the child is kept is on the other side of the village. It is rumoured that it used to be a place of learning, or a church, or a courtroom constructed for the handing out of justice in a time before the Pythia reinvented the concept.

They pass, beneath their soot cloud, along what might once have been a main street. This settlement, unlike many others, existed before the curse, and was a small town centred around the large building on the hill, like a town hugging the walls of a great palace. 

Sloped stone houses cling to their flimsy shapes by the slop of lumped grey mortar, alongside huts of wooden slats, the rare, brittle, desert kind, nailed with rusted, rotting screws. There are old houses, grand stone things with arched doorways and pillars half-fallen. Signs with the rusted words scrubbed away. The rest, the scrap, popped up around the skeleton of what once stood here as the refugees fled the cities long ago. It flared into a new settlement, and now, once more, it dies. Most of the buildings are empty. 

There are other ruins, far out upon the plane beyond and half-buried in the orange sand. Buildings bombed to pieces or degraded by some natural means, but these buildings were lucky, repaired piecemeal over time, and now stand like bastions of old ways, clinging to the dune-side. 

The facility is waking. Though almost deserted, word has reached the sisterhood of a call sent through a repaired radio network, to the settlements dotted across the planet, in villages and the ruins of hollow, tainted cities. A call to arms. A force is amassing itself here, or will someday amass itself. The details shift like the desert sands, through tangled time. Old forces are being called upon, forbidden forces, the forces that drove the Gods way so many centuries ago, and began this shifting, squabbling age of empires.

The carriages stop at the foot of the hill, its path too narrow and too sand-piled for their thin wheels and wide bodies. The party walks in a line – a layer of guard, ambassador, sisters, and reversed, arranged without thought. They meet no one. The mountain planted the seed of the child’s mind behind their eyes, and Klara feels her sisters beside her straining figurative ears. Yes, its presence lives within the walls. Klara can sense what she was able to trace from the convent, only stronger now, pungent to the point of nausea. Anger like nothing she has ever felt. 

The building is made of its original grey stone, but embellished and extended and patched up in the aftermath of solar storms and warhead blasts. Wood coats certain areas, and trail in dark buttresses toward the pilling sands. Parapets coated in cream seal, ornately carved, and in places tinny, rusted plates of metal patch the pieces of the roof torn away. Red brick boards up holes in the walls, leaving untidy fissures and seams through which the night winds sing. Extensions have been constructed of sandstone and marble and limestone, all in blocks as if hauled from the spoils of the quarry mines. Someone has been maintaining this place for generations, that much has plagued the public consciousness for years, but their worry has faded to a background intolerance. A distaste toward the strange practises resurrected here by the few bold and disloyal enough to try. The Pythia have had no reason to strike the place down as of yet. It is useful to maintain the illusion of freedom. Perhaps they were mistaken in that. It is one of the many actions that, in their community, has been long debated, brought up in circular persistence, but never taken. 

The door is locked, but its broken wooden surface is easily leveraged open by the guard’s axe; a curved blade affixed to its side and a spearpoint rising from its tip. The weapons are more decorative than practical, and rarely used outside of training. They exist more for the promise of power, the threat of violence, that the reality of it.

With the door wedged open, the group walk into a darkened hall. A moment in the dark before a gentle mechanical hum grumbles from all sides, as if the building is angered at being disturbed. The hall illuminates, fluorescent panels overhead flickering to pale yellow life. The quality of it is strange, shallow, as the crimson oil lamps and mountain infernos are not. There is no sign of life. Perhaps they were tipped off somehow and are already hiding. Any person who resides in this place is sure to be unfaithful, and likely to resist their influence. But all know the consequences of dissent. Even illusionary freedom only goes so far. 

The party splits. From the inside, the facility seems a maze, and the signal that they harken towards – the monstrous anger – has weakened and dispersed into a hundred potentialities in the air. Their magic is weak here. The Gods turn away in scorn and offense, and cannot thrive. The light is too absolute, in its neatly separated panels, to cast deep shadows. There is no flicker to allow, in the lick of a flame spurt, for a single shadowed eye to blink. It is unnatural.

Even a few paces away from her fellow sisters, Klara can feel her connection to them fade. Heading along the easter corridor, passed a sign marked with letters and numbers delineating some system she does not understand, she is alone. 

Her embroidered robes, the lengthened cuffs that trail tasselled toward the floors, feel incongruous. The floor is made of a strange material, half eaten away by rot. A sort of plastic, white faded to sunburnt yellow, and touched by dark veins of scorch. 

She passes through a cold, drafty hall, where the stone ceiling above sits intact unlike so much of the building. Rafters arch, and long windows stand mournful and sunburnt against the indigo sky. The cracked glass is stained with colour. There are long wooden tables pushed up against the walls. 

She passes laboratories – the word comes to her in the mountain’s voice, despite the lack of magic here, in a context she can understand. The rooms, white and clean and cramped with strange devices, are like smoke chambers, like miniature temples for the worship of heretical things. Things that affront the stars and dissect the sacred. The unquestionable, untouchable, things not meant to be, and impossible to, understand. 

Cracked glassware sits gathering dust, unattended, and humming machines sit in wait, blaring lights of red and orange and giving off waves of heat and smoke, imitating holy things. 

Klara continues, and it feels as if the maze will never end. She passes through a moonlit courtyard of paved reddish stone, and struggles to locate the source that she seeks. It is difficult to sense, as if it does not belong here. As if it thinks upon some opposite, destructive frequency.

But the mountain guides her. It persists where no magic should. Perhaps a piece of it is still contained within her, or perhaps, her fear reminds, it is not a force of the smoke and flames at all. It directs her to a hall on the second level. A hole in the floor forces her to press her back against the brick wall and sidle across a thin passage, nearly tripping over her robes. There has been no sign of anyone, and the voices of her sisters are tangled and far away. 

On the other side of the gap is a wooden door with a metal label, its contents long scraped away. It is unlocked. Klara steps into a large hall where shafts of moonlight reach in rays through a high-set window on the far side, and moth-eaten seats ring a stage below in cramped rows. It is like a theatre, the sort she has seen through osmotic visions from larger temples and grander cities where their preachers draw real crowds, and their stories are more formally celebrated. 

The stage below is cluttered with boxes and metal shelves and dusty instruments that Klara has the sudden urge to break. They are wrong things, old things that led to their curtailing splendour. Amongst the clutter, behind a board of black, flint-like stone held on a wooden frame, she senses a flicker of movement. Despite carefully held breath, and carefully hidden mind, Klara sees the murky silhouette of a small form crouched behind the box. The moonlight is what gives it away. Through the walls, Klara hears a grunt and the sound of metal striking stone. It must be coming from somewhere below, perhaps the courtyard. The silhouette quivers, and ducks deeper into the clutter. Upon seeing its outline, the aura is uncovered, sewn together from its various superpositions. The anger, the bitter flame – It is here, in this room. The creature that will spark the end of the universe. 

Klara walks between the rows of chairs, down carpeted steps eaten by cockroaches and fiery moths. She crushes one under her sandalled heel in her haste, and its carapace cracks like an eggshell. It writhes away into the dark, leaking. 

The figure behind the boxes is no longer moving. If Klara were to enter the room now, she would see nobody, yet the scent, now caught, is unmistakable.

She should run and get the guards, or one of the ambassadors who are permitted to speak to the child without danger of contamination. Another metal scrape sounds from beyond the room, followed by a shout. Someone is being taken prisoner, or killed. The child’s guardian, or creator. The one who told them to hide in here, in a place so difficult to access. 

Curiosity overwhelms her. She remembers purple light dashed across a pallid, blue-grey sky, and a tower like a needle, or a fork, stirring the clouds. A child beneath it. She reaches the stage and bends down. The moonlight drifts and catches onto the ragged edge of a sleeve, the jutting angle of a crouched knee.

“Hello,” Klara whispers, and she feels the air pulled taut, anxiety radiating from the alcove behind the boxes. It jumps, scuffling backwards against the floorboards. One of the shelves is knocked, and threatens to topple. “It’s alright,” she soothes, “you don’t need to be afraid.”

“Yes I do,” says the child, in a strained whisper from behind its cardboard barricade. “They said you’re coming to take me away to the mountain.”

“That’s right.” Klara’s curiosity keeps her rooted to the spot. She should call out now to her fellow sisters, tell them that the child is found. She should unfasten the ornamental knife from her belt and hold the child still at its blade-point to keep it from running away. Instead, she speaks to it in a quiet voice. “You’ve done well to hide yourself; I could barely sense a thing. I can tell you’re very strong.” Ordinarily, someone of her abilities would have been taken to the convent years ago. The child stays silent. 

“Won’t you come out of the dark?” Hesitation, and then movement, the shifting of cardboard and clatter of metal. Klara can feel the child’s mind racing; hearts hammering away in their chest, an instinct to run, to fight, to find some way to escape. A girl emerges; pale and thin and no more than eight, with lank, sand-brown hair hanging over her face. Her face is knotted in an expression of purest contempt.

“My name is Klara,” the sister tells her, reaching out a hand in a show of trust, of openness. Her hand is un-gloved. “What is your name?”

“Tecteun.” The girl’s grey eyes dart toward the exit, hands twitching at her sides. Her clothes are drab; a white tunic and dark trousers, a tattered brown vest hanging loose over her quivering chest. 

There is another thump through the walls, a crack against stone, like someone being thrown to the ground. Tecteun winces. 

“He told me to stay,” she says, addressing the dusty stage floor. “He saw the carriages. He said you were coming to talk, but you’re here to kill him, aren’t you?”

A cry sounds, muffled, and peters out into silence. 

“Why would we do that?” Klara asks, still quiet, still crouched. Prone, making a show of her friendliness. 

The child scowls, grubby fingers fiddling with the hem of her tunic. “Because you’re evil.”

“We’re not evil.” _You are,_ she doesn’t say, because this doesn’t seem fair. The mountain’s warning echoes in her mind: _Not a child, but a monster, an evil thing. By its hand, an empire will rise._

“Yes you are,” the girl insists. “He wants to make things better, but you want everything to die.”

Klara wonders what nonsense this man she speaks of, presumably her father, or someone who has assumed the role of such, has been feeding her. Life is grim, but the solution does not lie in this; in the old science that triggered the end in the first place. 

“Of course we don’t want everything to die. But these old practises, they are what angered the Gods so long ago, sent them to the stars, to unravel the forces that kept this planet in balance –”

The child scoffs, and the bitter flame flares. “Stories. Stupid stories.” She yanks a thread from her sleeve. The moonlight brightens as it drifts by. A gust of wind rattles through a gap in the thin glass. A leaf is torn from nowhere, and slams against the glass, red and wide. There are no trees save twisted, black things for miles. It is like a bloodied hand against the windowpane. 

“We’re not evil,” Klara mutters, below a whisper. 

Another thump, and a shout, and the child perks up, scrambling to an upright kneel. Klara turns to her, and then back to the window. The leaf is gone. 

“Why are they hurting him?”

 _To get to you_ , Klara thinks to herself, guarded behind her strong walls. It doesn’t make sense. Bitter aura aside, she is just a child. A child with a father, resurrecting old practises, restoring an old building maintained over generations. Within, gathering resources, rebuilding machines, perhaps even amassing a rebellion. The girl’s ideas are dangerous, but she is not a monster. Maybe if the convent had taken her earlier and raised her among their ranks her abilities could have been put to use, but there can be no question of that now. She is already convinced of heretical ways, and besides, the others will kill her. 

In her head, her little piece of the mountain who is not the mountain rolls its eyes in scorn. 

_I should have expected something like this._

Klara hears footsteps in the hall outside. 

“Stay here,” Klara says to the child. “Hide.” 

Tecteun looks confused for only a moment, but without being told twice she crouches down and edges back amongst the boxes and shelves, out of sight. The shafts of moonlight have moved on, leaving the hall dark. The stench of mould deepens. 

Klara gathers her robes and stands, walking back up the steps towards the door. Beyond it, she edges back across the hole in the floor, and finds an ambassador nearby. She walks towards Klara crisply, her boots tapping against the strange plastic floor. 

“There you are,” the woman says. Her name escapes Klara, in her confusion. Her chest feels tight with more than the aura of the child with its sour taste. Above anything else, she feels certain. Perhaps she is being influenced by the monster hidden within the girl, if such a thing truly exists. 

“We have found the proprietor of this place,” the ambassador continues. “He has not revealed the location of the child.”

“I have searched this wing,” Klara says. Her voice takes on a different tone with the ambassador; temperate and wise, without inflection. “No sign of it. The aura is weakening.”

“We may have come too late. Word may have reached the village ahead of the carriages.”

No one here would have the ability to parse their intentions from so far away. A monster would, perhaps, but there are none in this place. The imposter in the mountain lied. 

They hurt the girl’s father, but do not kill him. Although he is infamous among the townsfolk for his practises, and affiliation with the facility, there is a certain line crossed in murdering citizens, unwarranted or not. It is bound to raise questions. As is killing children, but for the fate of the world, potential unrest is a small price to pay. They are forced to release the man, and he does well to ward off their telepathic prying. From the perspective of the other sisters, the man has no daughter. 

The search is called off for the night, and it is agreed that the fire should be consulted once more for further guidance. 

On the journey back to the convent the suns are beginning to rise, and an air of malcontent sits heavily upon all passengers. Blood dries on the curved blades of the guards’ weapons, and failure settles heavily upon their backs, along with something else. A dawning sense of what they had set out to do. An influence is lifted, and her sisters begin to wonder why they acted so quickly, when carrying out the mountain’s will. 

But in Klara’s mind, the presence remains. The false God sulks, and Klara can feel it glaring at her in contempt. Her suspicions were right all along. They were being tricked, lied to by some opposing force whose power now fades. She smiles softly in the pale sunrise, knowing that she has done the right thing. 

At the convent, Klara slips away from the group. The High Priestess has no need of words to tell her of their failure. The entire order upon the mountain knows before they even arrive. Besides, they are confused, disorientated, as the influence of the false God slips away. Klara has more important things to puzzle over, concerning the piece of it that still clings to her despite its fading from the minds of her kin. 

She heads to one of the convent’s many communion rooms. Not the main chambers of ornate marble carvings and huge pits of carefully stoked flame, but one of the less sacred places, available at all times. A wall in a large hall with holes set into the stone, pits of charcoal where small, naked flames burn at all hours. In front of its gaze, Klara bows her head, and touches the fingertips of one hand to the hot stone arch that rings the flame. She searches for an authentic presence, the comforting, spiritual aura that she was taught to seek, bolstered by the network of minds surrounding. She needs clarity, familiarity – she reaches out towards the spirits that she understands, ones that do not speak.

Instead, a voice echoes in her skull. _Hello again._

“What are you?” 

_I am disappointed. Disappointed, but not surprised. Compassion is a hardy root, a stubborn roach. You could not be convinced. It is logical, given you are not one of them._

“One of who?” She whispers aloud, pressing her fingers against the stone. The surface is scathingly hot. 

_Such a shame you are the only one with which I can communicate freely. I reach them through you, as I’m sure you are beginning to understand. Our connection, for once, has proven useful, given your abilities this go around._

“What do you mean?”

_I tire of these revelations. It will come to you, if you let it._

“What will?”

_The truth._

Klara is afraid of pulling her hand away, and finding the voice still there, in her ear. What if it’s right? It spoke to her first, after all. Did the false god ride from the metaphysical ether their reality upon her back?

 _Close, child._ If stone and flame could chuckle, it would, she thinks, sound like the sputter and lurch of the heat, and the slight, blackened crumble of the stone beneath her raw fingertips.

“What will happen now?” She can feel the minds around her growing curious, sensing her barely veiled distress. 

_The end of the universe. I am not a liar._

“Yes you are.” 

_We’ll see about that._

Fed up, Klara pulls her hand away, nursing her singed fingers in her other hand. She hastily tugs her veil down over her face and tucks both hands within her tapered sleeves. She hisses a parting remark to the stone, and the fire that wavers thinly within. “She is just a child.”

The sound of it inside her mind confirms her worst fears. 

_She is a monster._

This isn’t possible. There has been no connection forged, her walls are down, the creature’s hold over the Pythia has weakened and fallen silent within the network of minds, and yet it exists within her, parasitic. 

Klara masks her fear from the hands that reach, concerned, and the feeling is soon lost in the elastic pull of the net that connects them, ensnares them. Protects them. 

_You are not one of them._

Life at the convent returns to normal, as if the Pythia’s shared consciousness was never disturbed, never hijacked by a malicious force of unknown origins. The visions, however, do not stop. They are less forceful, they return to the characteristic, vague impressions that the true spirits offer up. The end is coming soon, but soon is a malleable concept. 

Life for Klara is never normal again. 

A slow shift begins, not only within her own mind, but in the minds of her sisters. 

They begin to avoid her, skirting past her in wide berths in the halls. Even the children, not yet fully accustomed to navigating and comprehending the web of thoughts surrounding them, avert their eyes, whisper amongst themselves, hide their heads in their books and their faces behind their veils. 

She is reminded, forcibly, unfamiliarly, of faces hidden behind hands, whispering, sniggering. Bright hallways, colourful writing scribbled across the walls. Blue skirts and ties.

The High Priestess launches no subsequent attack on the monster in the village. It is communicated that actions were made rashly, under the influence of a malicious force. There are theories passed around between the higher ranks of the order, at what the force may have been. They cite the tired old legends: spiders, monsters, nightmares, storms. One of the old shadows that dealt in chaos rather than harmony and sought to punish their kind further for the sins of the past.

In Klara’s head, it whispers. Chides, scolds, yells, screams. Speaks, sometimes cordial, sometimes enraged. Sometimes, it seems almost lonely. 

Action returns to a potential never realised, while in the village below, a facility awakens. The Pythia revel in their old methods, tried and true, journeying with increasing frequency to the village below, their ambassadors preaching, their sisters wandering, absorbing. Attempting to understand, to dissuade, to garner faith and discourage disobedience through the subtle undercurrents that flow beneath the soil. 

Over the proceeding weeks, Klara spends more and more time sequestered in the bowels of the convent. On the nights when she does not sleep, which, increasingly so, become the norm, she journeys through the caverns into the depths of the mountain’s core, where heat simmers and glows, flowing in streams of magma and spirit bile. She seeks the unbridled eye, apart from the infecting voice of what she once thought was the mountain. On the nights when she does sleep, the voice finds her with more clarity than ever, and asks her what she hopes to find. It shows her, piecemeal, and with a sordid grin, the truth of all this.

It shows her a woman in a room as chromic and grey as the laboratories, unveiled, unmarked, stirring a gelatinous, wheat mixture in a bowl. The woman wears Klara’s face, but with more clarity of feature, a sharpened image of her own blurred reflection. Reality shifts like sand. There is a woman listening to strange music, with a harshly chopped fringe, that works at a stall, and a woman half burned away by fire, and one who tells stories to terrified children in the night, and one who toils in a laboratory of her own, in a field of white and identical rows of green. Slowly, she begins to understand what it meant when it told her she does not belong here, and remembers her old dreams. She, like the false God, is an invading force, conjured from nothing at all. 

She dances precarious upon the crumbling foundation of what she believed was her life; growing into a starved, small existence in the canyon village, being taken with pride to the convent, and left to fend off the old spirits in the mountain’s heart during her initiation. The pride of her robes, the first tattoos’ sting, the smoke’s elusive voice. But these things never happened. This would be devastating enough, but the false God’s revelations come with a final, vindictive sting. 

Klara’s thoughts are linked with the convent at large, with every mind attuned to listen. She cannot hide the secrets that reveal themselves, through the relentless, carved mouth of the shadow. What the others begin to understand in fearful instinct, they soon know with assured clarity. They know she is not real. What begins as suspicion, whispers, avoidance, becomes fear. They fear the thing that leeches from their collective mind, the thing that they remember, with fading surety, living among them for so long. It is convenient for them to pin their continued bleak visions upon the otherworldly intruders. Perhaps the doom approaching is all part of their unknowable game, their trick, to trap them in service of an ancient shadow. The Priestesses must know the truth, and simply turn away from it. 

Klara begins to understand as well. By saving the monster, she has doomed the universe. She is indifferent to this, because she knows she could not have done differently. Somehow, she knows that it is what she was meant to do, to correct the cosmic equation. 

There is a new theory, rising in popularity, that Klara brought the creature to them. It is the only explanation. She is an intruder, she has deceived them all. 

Klara takes to wandering in her final days. Raving, searching, scrambling through the rock with her fingertips in search of something deeper because she _knows_ there is more. Below the ground, below the abyss, and the white plateau, and the stars, and the gold. Deeper, where gravity will not let her fall, or permit her dimensions to exist. The mountain tells her that there is no use in trying. He says with a rare, sympathetic lilt, that he has tried it himself. There is no way down. This is the end of their journey. 

One day, action is decided upon, having long hung in the air formless. They find Klara lurking in the deepest, restricted areas below the convent, where the heat is deadly and the fire potent enough to rend minds. Perhaps she should have tried to act inconspicuous, keep her head down, follow the rules. They jump upon the first logical excuse they encounter to name her a traitor. 

They take her, and lead her up to the surface, crying desecration, crying invasion and sacrilege. They don’t understand. The child beneath the light needs their help. She tells them this, but it only confirms, in their minds, their decided-upon narrative angle. She is insane. The heat deep beneath the earth has lured her, and taken her mind. It is accepted by the ambassadors and officials as yet another unfortunate loss. 

They throw her into the cells in the convent’s lower levels, built into the mountainside. A tiny slit of a window betrays the world of light beyond that filters into the grimy room white despite its orange hue, so blinding it is against the darkness. The false God finds this hilarious. It laughs at her, and sometimes comforts. It, too, is trapped, it confesses to her. Unable to escape. It will stay here until the mountain falls, and they lay the first metal foundations, the circuitry, and then the stone, and then the minds. It will remain; the first headstone in the graveyard. 

In the cells beside her, the Silents scream through the night, despite their names. 

It is easy for her to fight it here, with her efforts concentrated upon nothing else. She keeps the shadow contained within her and stops it from influencing the flames any further, just as she did when she discovered its true nature, on the moonlit stage. Resignedly, her companion explains why this is possible, though its explanations change each time it retells them. Perhaps, in these depths, it too is stripped away, primal, and has begun to forget. 

This is an abyss, he says, and they have reached the very bottom. 

_You’ll notice this is out of sequence._

“I haven’t.” Klara scrapes a groove into the cave wall with a sharpened edge of flint. She has been sharpening it against the stone for days and days. It could be a weapon, if she were to use it against the guard who brings daily rations of food and water – decreasing in quality and volume as time goes on – but she knows she would make it no further than that. The guards may be here mainly for decoration, a show of might, but they still have blades. They still know how to use them. She, on the other hand, has a sharp rock. Besides, she doesn’t want to lose her only drawing utensil. 

_Someone has,_ the shadow replies. 

Klara hums to show her indifference. 

_Neither of us are dead yet._

“No.”

_But the moment has passed._

“They do not kill. They draw the line there, ordinarily.” 

_There will not be another._ It often does this, talks between her lines as if imagining a better response on her part. 

_The rules are flimsy, back so far. Time is new._

“Time is tangled.” 

_This was a mistake._

“Yes.”

_Not the plan, the plan was brilliant._

“Then what?”

_The entire exercise, child. It was a waste, a bust. The mountain is too large a thing to inhabit for long. Expansive, timeless. I am incongruent, small, perhaps if I were more than this echo… But it is useless to speculate._

“Yes.” She is trying to draw on the rock. Out the mountain window, she is too low to the plain to see the village, but the spire of the facility pokes, a dark speck above the crag. 

_I hope you are proud of yourself._

“Yes.” 

_The universe will burn._

Be that as it may, Klara knows she made the right choice. She has to know, because the alternative is unthinkable. “She is a child.”

_This mountain will burn._

A scream echoes through the walls; warbling, unrestrained, excruciating. 

“Good.” 

Many years later, just as promised, fire swells up and takes the convent. Ships in the sky, rending its surface in schismatic strokes of colour, drop pellets of flame and destruction upon the mountain and, when only its dark skeleton remains, they keep on falling, scouring the stone down to the foundations. They will not stop, and plan to take the mountain apart piece by piece, as if searching for a treasure at its core. 

Klara strokes the stone, calling, waking. She has spent the years in memories – she has more than enough to sustain her. 

From her rockface window, she has watched the world change from afar, just as her sisters above her in the courtyards and watchtowers have looked down upon the canyon, powerless, despite all they tried. 

She watched a rusted machine claw its way from the desert planes to the stars above, and return, fire catching its torn wings, barely slow enough to survive impact. She heard, as they talked of a creature brought back. 

She sensed the minds of the village begin to shift, the knowledge siphoned from her sister’s knowledge as they returned from the crowds below. At first they were afraid of what the doctor on the mountain was doing, as she recruited more and more self-professed new-age scientists for her heretical practises, and to study the creature she brought back from the stars. Until, when the Pythia could stand the scorn no longer, they riled a march upon the facility doors, and the doctor showed the world what her creature could do. 

Torn between hope and loyal belief, the Pythia were forced to play along, or to incite civil unrest. And the village slowly became the focal point of the entire withering planet. Transporters and trawlers and vast, metal planes journeyed there, with people and resources from far across the planet, from old, more powerful cities drawn by dawning hope. More ships, sending envoys to an empty green planet in the stars. Power slowly shifting, slipping through the splintered fractals of their order set unbalanced, and sent toppling, torn from the inside as well as out. The city’s power is now absolute. Metal and stone and fields of tents are tacked onto the old settlement, so that all that remains of the old place, the stones that survived the blasts long ago, is the facility upon the hill. In their promises of hope – of lengthened lifespans, of engineered telepathic abilities, superior strength, reflexes, endurance, an end to the crises of famine and stillbirth and plague – they have ensnared the masses. Alliances revoked, it soon became apparent that it was far, far too late to take their power back. 

The child has become a monster, of this there can be no doubt. Perhaps someday her metal ships will darken the skies above the universe itself, and the stars will quiver as the Priestesses now do, and plead, standing their ground in faith. Perhaps the otherworldly fire she creates will cleanse the universe just as it tears the convent to the ground. It is a symbolic gesture, a show of power. A tearing down of the old ways. The death of the old tyrants. 

The Pythia flee the convent in droves. Many will not survive the journey to the greater temples, where ships wait to take them away to a nearby world. Someday, it will turn to red wastes. At its core will burn an eternal flame and they will wander that place for eternity as their power steadily fades, and their true name is slowly forgotten. Klara watches them scale the path down the mountain outside, heaving through the thick, toxic smoke that chokes the sky. The stars are invisible beyond the mass. They are like insects, crawling down the rockface by the light of red lamps, spilling luminous oil upon the rock, like the blood that coats the cobbles of the courtyard far above. The waystation is a smouldering ruin sending rivulets of smoke into the sky to join the rest. The ground shudders, the heat below them stirred. The mountain will crack, and its innards will spill, magma across the plane cast indigo and silver in the night. These are the immediate visions that press themselves urgently upon the network, backwards echoes of the minutes and hours to come. 

The Silents are in a frenzy. None of them have been pulled from the wreckage. The entrance to the subterranean cells has been buried under layers of rubble. 

Outside Klara’s slit of a window, a young girl dressed in the undecorated red of an initiate watches her with round, pale eyes, stopped upon her desperate path down the mountainside. Some families keep the old faith, and they will have no place in the new world that the monster will create. The child’s dirty blonde hair and harsh expression reminds Klara of the girl in the facility shadows, behind her cardboard fortress. 

Klara chokes on the smoke outside as she tells her to run. Afraid, the girl turns and scrabbles down the cliff face, hitching her robes up to her calves. There was familiarity, in the lines of her face not yet formed, ringed by white light, bathed in a teal mausoleum glow. 

“You,” she coughs. Time is tangled, the rules are lax.

The shadow stops laughing, though Klara isn’t sure when it began. _This is the end of the line, dearest roach. We will meet again, I think. Before the bombs go off._

She laughs, and it laughs, because she can see the whole sorry mess stretching up above. Does the shadow still want what it once did? Does it remember why it threw itself over the edge in the first place? She splutters out the word, “Clever.” 

Another bomb drops, and the impact does more than knock the skeleton of a tower over as easily as a twig stuck in the sand, and send it toppling from the summit, it burns time itself, blistering its edges, twisting its innards. The new power sources the monster draws upon are strange and old, from a place where there are no stars. 

Two words come out as a strangled rasp. Her lungs spit acid, covered in black soot. The ground cracks. 

The laughter stops, and she is left alone, at the bottom of the abyss.

She warns the sky. “Remember.” 

**Gallifrey, the End of Time**

The dead woman holds her fingers to her wrist. They’ve been there for quite some time, pressed tight upon her stubbornly stationary radial artery. The Doctor is lying on the floor beside a neuroblock recently administered, still zapping its way through recent memory, cutting around the shape of a girl named Clara Oswald. 

“It’s a Type 41, and I don’t have much experience with models so outdated. I’ve worked with scout vehicles – they’re the ones they generally send out after… anachronisms.” Ashildr – or Me, as she prefers to be called – is inappropriately happy, and doing an abysmal job at hiding it. 

Finally, after so many billions of years, she has stolen herself a TARDIS, its pilot conveniently out of the way and unlikely to want it returned. She is holding a grey-covered tome written in Gallifreyan, an instruction manual that she is attempting, with surprising success, to decipher. Apparently, given enough time, even the secret language of the Time Lords can be translated. 

“Botched-up Mire first aid kit administered by a renegade, must be something their editors wanted to fix,” Me continues, infuriatingly bright. “I can take you back, but I’m keeping the ship. I’m tired of watching stars die.” It is clear that she is used to talking to herself, which is understandable. There hasn’t been anyone else to address for a very long time. 

“What about the Doctor?” Clara asks. As if on cue, the old man groans in his sleep. She wonders if it hurts, to have your memory burned through. It’s happened to her before, but of course, in hindsight, the sensation of the process has faded along with the memories it was administered to hide.

“Ah, yes,” Me replies, looking down her nose at him. “I suppose you’d object to leaving him on Gallifrey. I have no obligation to do so. I received my payment for his apprehendment billions of years ago.”

“Didn’t spend it all on sweets, I hope,” Clara mutters bitterly. 

“We can go back to Trap Street and take him to his TARDIS, how’s that?” She’s patronising Clara, like a parent arriving at a compromise for a petulant child on the verge of a tantrum. “Then Gallifrey. Let me know if your pulse starts again.”

Clara nods. She takes a shuddering breath, but the movement feels strange. She’s never considered the sensation of her blood flowing as something palpable, something that connected her body together in concrete sensation. She notices it now that it’s stopped. 

“I’d have to check my diaries – I didn’t get things backed up until the 30th century – but I’m almost certain that his TARDIS disappeared from Trap Street one day without a trace. I wasn’t able to get into it, try as I might, and believe me,” Me chuckles to herself, “I tried. But it sealed itself off, maybe in respect. Or in mourning.” 

“What if he wakes up?”

Me steps back from the console, still holding the manual aloft. She steps around the Doctor’s form, eyeing him with a mixture of sympathy and disdain. 

“I’ve dealt with this sort of technology before. Memory editing, it’s a nasty business. The more important, the more central a person or event is to you – laced through every waking thought – the longer it takes. He’ll be out for a day at least.”

“What have you forgotten?” Clara’s curiosity is perfunctory. There is not enough room in her apparently-frozen mind for outward sympathy.

“Well, I’ve forgotten, haven’t I? People that were too painful to remember. Deeds too dastardly to recall.” Me smiles. “We should get him to the Zero Room. Most TARDISes have them.” 

“The what?”

“It’s for recovery. Healing, relaxation, meditation.”

“Ah, right. That’s probably why I’ve never heard of it.” 

Together, the two women, both of whom stand barely past five feet, carry the Doctor into the Zero Room. The ship, sensing its new pilot’s distress, has the good sense to keep it close by. They nearly drop him twice. The room is a white void, not unlike the extraction chamber. Clara shakes herself to ward off old memories. In her current state, they circle her at all times, waiting to pounce and drag her senses back to an earlier time. Even now, she can smell petrichor and burnt souffles. 

They dump the Doctor’s body unceremoniously to the floor, not for lack of trying. Her dead muscles ache. Surprisingly, the room catches the Doctor’s form and holds it suspended, levitating in the cool, temperate mist. 

“I need to go and see someone,” Clara tells Me as they walk back to the console room. 

Me nods, sombre and sympathetic. “Of course. Your family. I’ll do the best I can.”

In guilt, she realises that her family haven’t even crossed her mind. “Just take me back to after it… after it happened,” she tells Me. “I have the address.”

When Clara exits the TARDIS, she finds that the exterior has rearranged itself into a large cardboard box, just tall enough to allow her to exit without having to crawl. She finds herself inside an enclosed, dark space, with clothes hanging from a rail along the ceiling. A wardrobe. It’s a reverse-Narnia situation. The clothes are small and brightly coloured. Children’s clothing. How many children get to witness a real-life zombie coming out of their closet? 

She steps out of the wardrobe and into a familiar room. Just a few hours ago, she stood here with the Doctor. Lucy Riggins is asleep in her white cot beneath a mobile of planets and stars. As Clara steps lightly towards the door, the baby shifts in her cot and begins to wail. 

Affixed to the side of the cot, a baby monitor beeps, and Clara hears hurried footsteps bounding up the stairs. The curtains are drawn, but Clara gets the impression of afternoon sun through the sheer material. She wonders if it’s the sun of the next day, or the day after that. Me said her navigation might be a little shoddy, despite her extensive studies of Time Lord technology over the years. The wallpaper is a pleasant shade of teal blue, and the walls are painted with purple flowers, no doubt by Lucy’s father. 

The nursery door is pushed open, and a man steps through, a soothing hush already on his lips as he spots Clara standing by the cot. His expression slips into shock. 

“Clara,” he breathes. 

“Hi Rigsy.” She tries to smile, but its shape feels weak. Lucy is still crying.

“But I –”

“I know,” she says, holding her hands up in a placating gesture. “The Doctor found a way. He always does.”

“But I saw your body. I carried it out of Trap Street. I saw the coroner drive away with you in a bag, how –”

“Because he did a thing, and it all worked out, and I just wanted to tell you because,” she sighs, and immediately wishes she hadn’t, because the air feels alien in her throat. “I didn’t want you feeling guilty, Rigsy, because everything’s fine.”

Rigsy snorts, and smiles, wide and sad. He moves across the room and takes Lucy gently from her crib. “Did you come here in that blue box time machine?”

“Not specifically that one, no. Why?”

“It’s just that, erm,” he rocks Lucy back and forth, frowning slightly. “It’s been four years.”

Ah. Shoddy navigation indeed. Her eyes widen and guilt leaves her tongue tasting sour. “I’m sorry, Rigsy. I tried to come as soon as I could, but like I said, it’s a different machine, and the Doctor’s –”

“The Doctor’s what?”

“Wait a minute,” she says, narrowing her eyes and taking a step towards Rigsy and his baby. “That’s not Lucy?”

“No.” He bounces the baby girl in his arms. Clara can see her dark eyes beginning to droop once more. “This is Clara.” 

“Oh,” Clara breathes, “that’s a nice name.” She watches the baby’s small fist curl against her father’s shoulder.

“Well, Lucy was Jen’s Gran’s name, so I got to pick this one. Who else but the woman who saved my life?” There are tears in Clara’s eyes again, and she wonders how she’s managed so many in one day. 

“You’re aunt?”

“My aunt hated me.” Rigsy grins. “First it was just a hairband, but you... well. You’re a lot to live up to.” 

“Well, you don’t need to worry about that anymore, I’m fine.” She shivers as a tear rolls down her cheek. “Totally fine.” 

“Yeah, but how?” He looks at her strangely, as if his eyes are skirting over her face, sliding over the surface of the air she occupies. 

“It’s quite a long story. Really, really long, actually.” 

“Why don’t you come with me then. I’ve got to go pick Lucy up from school.” 

Clara never saw the rest of Rigsy’s apartment when she visited the first time, but it’s cosy, if a little cramped. Every wall is painted in some way, or affixed with a vibrant canvas. She sees one picturing a woman with dark hair and raven wings sprouting from her back. 

“Jen’s a software developer,” Rigsy explains, as he carries baby Clara down out of the bedroom, now sporting a coat and red knitted beanie. “She took an online course and got a job at VOR, that tech company. I got to quit my lousy job after that. She’s the breadwinner, I’m the stay-at-home Dad slash freelance artist. I do designs for ads and merchandise, that sort of thing.”

“That’s brilliant,” Clara says. There are crude drawings rendered in crayons and markers affixed to the fridge, and a clutter of toys on the carpet by the TV. “I bet you’re a great Dad.”

“Well, I don’t like to brag,” Rigsy grins. 

They take a bus into the centre of London, baby Clara rugged up in her pram, and adult Clara rugged up in one of Rigsy’s hoodies. It’s late October, and snow threatens to fall from low, grey clouds above the mulch of brownish autumn leaves stamped into puddles along the pavement. London looks the same as ever. She recognises the buildings from her usual commute. There’s an old cinema that was closed off and in the process of being stripped before being torn down. It’s gone now. 

On the noisy bus drive, Clara explains her really, really long story, though she changes one rather major aspect of it. Stories are no good without a little embellishment. She leaves out the part where her heart neglected to start up again. 

“That’s insane,” Rigsy whispers. If anyone has overheard their conversation, they make no comment. It’s hardly the strangest conversation anyone has had on public transport. There is a woman two seats down having a loud argument over the phone in Spanish. 

“What’s the end of the universe like?” Rigsy asks. 

“Sort of dark, and yellow. I stayed in the TARDIS. There were armchairs.”

“Do you still have the tattoo?” In answer, Clara pulls her hair back from her neck and shows him the three neat black zeroes emblazoned on her skin. “Incredible,” Rigsy breathes. 

“So, does everyone think I’ve been dead for four years?”

“Err, yeah,” Rigsy scratches the back of his neck in discomfort. “Me and that Mayor lady, we carried your body out after the Doctor got taken away by the Time Lords, like you said. I called the paramedics myself, even though I knew it was too late. The police came, and they called your Dad. They said they’d call the school too. Aneurysm, they said. God,” he sighs, “it was all my fault, I should never have called you over.”

His expression darkens, thoughts beginning to spiral. She remembers what that feels like. “So, what, you’d be dead. Don’t be stupid. I’m fine, it all worked out in the end.” 

Rigsy smirks wryly and taps his foot against the bus floor. “But there’s something you’re not telling me, right? Something’s wrong with you, I can tell, it’s like… It’s like you’re not really here. Two-dimensional, like those things in the subway. Makes me want to blink a lot. You’re not –”

“No,” Clara agrees. “Whatever you’re about to say, you’re right. I’m not.” Not alive, not really here, not really _real_. 

Rigsy swallows thickly. He doesn’t look at her. Clara has a feeling that this will be a regular occurrence, if she decides to stick around any longer. She wonders if it will get any worse. It’s not as if the Doctor explained, he kept on telling her it would all work out, up until the final moment. Did he know he was lying, or was he blinded by hope? Now there’s no one to tell her the rules. 

“I was terrified they were going to think I killed you,” Rigsy continues, with a smile stuck some way between fondness and discomfort. “But the Mayor smoothed it over with her retcon thing. She even let me keep my memories, which was a small form of apology, I suppose. There was this woman, too. A nice woman, one of the aliens living on Trap Street. She stayed until they took your body away, kept me company, you know. She lost someone to the Raven too. I don’t remember what her name was.” He’s rambling, but she appreciates it. Clara doesn’t want to think about being dead. She checks her pulse compulsively, but she knows it won’t be there. She would hear the rush of blood in her ears first. 

“That’s good,” she hums in response. People are kind, she reminds herself, even aliens disguised as people in secret streets. It’s a comforting thought. 

Lucy attends Shoreditch Park Primary, which is only a short walk away from the Cole Hill Secondary campus. 

“It’s a coincidence,” Rigsy explains, though Clara doesn’t believe in those. “Jen did her research and said this was the best school around. Best community school, that is. We can’t afford private. She wants Lucy to go to Coal Hill.” They walk in single file along the pavement, as other parents make the journey to collect their children. Baby Clara sleeps soundly in her pram, swaddled in blankets. “I didn’t even know you taught there until I saw the memorial on the school tour.” 

“Memorial?” Clara asks quietly. She passes by a pile of autumn leaves that was likely raked up only to be jumped in by excited school children, perhaps on their way out for a field trip. They skitter brown and mulched across the road as cars queue and shunter slowly past. Walking, Rigsy and Clara move much faster. 

Rigsy casts Clara a sympathetic look. She didn’t notice at first, but knowing the truth it is easy to see the difference that four years has made. He doesn’t so much look older as more put together. He smiles easily, and he wears a smart collared shirt under a padded waterproof jacket. No hoodie or flat cap in sight. It’s strange, the things people have collectively decided make one an adult. 

“Are you okay?” he asks. He almost runs down a stationary pedestrian ahead with his focus trained on Clara. Rigsy murmurs an apology, and they continue on. Clara isn’t sure what to say. 

“Look,” Rigsy continues, sighing deeply. Clara is too busy feeling sorry for herself to consider his feelings, which she only feels guilty about for a moment. The rest of her is focused on being dead. “Why don’t we walk by Coal Hill once we’ve got Lucy. It’s not too far out of the way, and there’s another bus stop nearby.”

“You don’t have to come with me, Rigsy –”

“Clara,” he says sternly, risking turning to her despite the clump of eager parents in front of them, impenetrable as the cars banking up along the road. “I won’t let you do it alone. No need to be brave anymore, yeah?”

Solemnly, Clara agrees. 

Clara watches the children racing from their red-brick classrooms at Shoreditch Park Primary, their little faces poking out of too-big collars and oversized black jumpers. She sees the classrooms through the windows; colourful pin boards decorated with crayon drawings and posters illustrating everything from the times tables to complementary colours. 

Lucy dashes from her classroom with a huge grin on her face, carrying a pile of laminated exercise books in her arms. Her backpack looks as large as a tortoise’s shell, and sports a similar shade of dark green. Her tartan skirt slaps against her calves. She looks like Rigsy, though her skin is a shade lighter, her nose more aquiline, her eyes a darker shade of black. Her hair is caught somewhere between coil and wave, spritzing madly beside her ears. 

Clara watches her greet her father from a few paces back, and finds herself tearing up for the third, impossible time in the last few hours. Corpses can’t cry, so surely it’s a good sign, but to her resigned disappointment, she still doesn’t have a pulse. 

“I’ve brought a friend with me today, Lucy. She wanted to see your new school,” says Rigsy, one hand on baby Clara’s pram and the other clasping Lucy’s little fist. At the sight of Clara, the girl stops, uncertain for a moment. She shrinks closer to her dad. 

“Hello,” Clara says, bending forward and pushing her hood back a fraction to show Lucy her kind smile. “My name’s…” she glances furtively at Rigsy, and settles upon a name she is almost certain she has gone by before, in another life. “Oswin,” Clara grins, and shakes Lucy’s hand in a curt, business-like fashion. The girl giggles. 

“Daddy she looks like the girl in the painting,” Lucy says, stepping back to her father’s side. 

“Does she really?” Rigsy asks, and smiles at Clara, a little embarrassed. This is what she was trying to save, when she took the Chronolock from Rigsy. At least, that’s a convenient thing to believe. Maybe what she really wanted was the thrill of the clock, counting down. The rush that comes with impending doom, and the potential release of its arrival. 

As they walk past the crammed shop fronts, along the grey pavement to Cole Hill, Lucy has already begun to warm to Clara by the simple virtue of her presence. Hanging back from her father and his pram, Lucy is telling Clara about her day at school. 

“Then we had to do a drawing of our favourite season. Mine’s autumn, but Harry stole all the oranges and reds and yellows, so I had to make the leaves purple.”

“That’s alright,” Clara says. Lucy’s breaths are puffs white in the flowering winter, and Clara doesn’t breathe at all. “I’ve seen plenty of purple leaves. Pink as well.”

“Really?” she cries, incredulous. Ahead of them, Rigsy chuckles.

“Really.” 

“I’m a bit sad actually, because it isn’t autumn anymore. All the leaves have fallen down.” Lucy jumps into a pile of wet brown leaves, and the resulting splash flecks her face with puddle water. 

“Lucy!” Rigsy calls back, exasperated. “You have to wear that skirt tomorrow.” 

“Ah, not quite,” Clara says, bending down and pointing up at the grey sky. A single autumn leaf, wide as a maple, drifts crimson across the smoggy skyline. “There’s one now.” 

“Where?” Lucy says, following the line of Clara’s finger. Rigsy calls back to her to keep up before Clara can be sure whether or not she is hallucinating. 

As they reach Coal Hill, Clara takes in all the little differences, and each is like a blow to the chest. The chessboard by the front doors has been repainted, and the graffiti by the gate has been covered and replaced with a new batch of crude tags, perhaps several times over. The trees she planted with the year eights in the patch by the front fence have grown several feet, and a smattering of muted leaves sit damp on the soil beneath them. 

Lucy is telling her, loudly and proudly, that this is where she’ll be going to secondary school. 

Rigsy tells Clara that the memorial is out front of the English offices, and asks if she wants them to come with her. 

“Thanks, but no,” Clara replies, keeping her hood pulled up tight. She sees the faces of familiar colleagues milling about in the schoolyard, and even thinks that she recognises some of the children. It’s difficult to tell, on the other side of puberty. “I’ve got to do this bit by myself.” 

Rigsy’s smiles is reluctant, but obliging, and Clara leaves him standing by the front gate with his two wonderful daughters. 

The memorial is a pinboard encased in glass – one of the old staff room notice boards, she thinks – and it’s for both of them. Just a year apart, and so very tragic. So very young, so unfair, so terrible. They are just some of the terms that are generally thrown around. There is a ledge surrounding the board, stacked with bouquets, fresh and withering, or pink and white. They remind her of the pungent things that suffocated her flat during her darkest days. 

There are teddy bears, slightly damp and sad and soiled by the rain that must, on occasion, fall hard enough to enter the little alcove space. They had already started putting the monument together when Clara still worked here. Alongside the memorial by the roadside where Danny lost his life, they thought something at the school would be appropriate, despite the fact that he hadn’t even completed his biannual contract. So many of the kids loved him already.

There are photographs pressed flat behind the glass, portraits taken on photo day, and selfies with students, and pictures snapped during field trips. There are notes behind the glass, from staff members, some of whom Clara barely spoke to, particularly in that final year. Their words are kind and surprisingly full. All the words plastered by Danny’s portraits on the roadside had seemed empty and ingenuine. Performative, like the pink flowers. Perhaps she had only felt that way because their love for him was nothing to what she felt, their pain a pinprick to her own. But words are the best people can do, she supposes, and the intent behind them does the work that language alone cannot. 

A plaque on the brick below the alcove reads their names, their tragic deaths. There’s a flowery quote about fate and its cruel touch. It’s all rather cliched. 

What brings tears to her eyes for the fourth impossible time is the extra little things fasted upon the class with tape and tack. There’s a laminated university acceptance letter pinned to the board welcoming Courtney Woods to study a Bachelor of Physical Sciences. 

There’s a page torn from a sketchbook rendered in faded pastels, thick and smudged. Two figures holding hands, brown and peach, with angels wings. The drawing is signed by Maeve Arden. Someone has tagged the plastic sheet covering the page in permanent marker; _Ozzy and the Squaddie_. 

She wipes her tears before returning to Rigsy. She wonders if her eyes are red and bloodshot. They feel as if they should be, but Clara has a suspicion that they have lost the ability to react. 

Lucy is tugging impatient on her father’s jacket sleeve, a petulant frown steepening on her face. Tantrum encroaching. It’s time they got home. 

At his concern, Clara tells Rigsy that she just needs a moment. She doesn’t have any more moments, but the bus ride back to Rigsy’s flat serves well enough. It is long and full of too many stops. Lucy draws pictures in her breath-fog upon the window, and Clara has to guess what they are. All the way, her fingers press hard upon her wrist, willing, _willing._ What would she tell the world, if she were to come back to life? She’d probably have to leave the country. 

When they return to Rigsy’s flat, Me is waiting at the dining table. 

“You,” Rigsy breathes, dropping his keys with a clatter upon the kitchen counter. “What are you doing here?” 

“Oh, is this him?” Me asks idly. She has helped herself to a cup of coffee. 

“Dad, who’s that?” Lucy asks worriedly. Baby Clara is stirring in her blanket swaddle. 

“Lucy, could you take your sister upstairs to bed and sing her a song?” Rigsy asks his daughter, bending down and gripping her narrow shoulders. 

“But I’m _hungry.”_

“I know, and if you wait a bit, I’ll make pancakes. Does that sound good?”

Lucy’s petulance falls away, and she grins, bounding on the balls of her feet, school shoes discarded on the front mat. In slow, gentle movements, Lucy lifts her little sister from her pram. She begins to wail and whimper softly. Lucy shushes her and carries her up the carpeted stairs at a cautious walk. 

Rigsy smiles at them until they are out of sight, then turns to Me with a blazing look in his eyes. Clara dithers awkwardly by the dining table, trying to catch her eye. Clara told her to stay in the TARDIS, though she can hardly complain. When has she ever followed that particular instruction?

Rigsy steps purposefully out of the narrow entryway and into the open living area. Clara realises that, in her very long story, she had forgotten to mention Me popping back into the picture at the end of the universe. 

“Rigsy, it’s okay,” Clara says placatively, stepping between him and Me. 

“What, is she here to kill you again?” Rigsy asks coldly, glaring at who he knows as the Mayor as she sips her stolen coffee.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Me calls, smiling in a false, irritating fashion. 

“Yes, it’s him,” Clara replies.

“What do you mean, what about me?” Rigsy asks. His shoulders relax a fraction, and he walks past Clara to stand by the dining table. 

“She probably doesn’t remember you. Is that right?” Clara addresses Me, who waits a deliberately drawn-out moment before replying.

“That’s right. I have to make space somehow. Delete the unimportant things.”

“Hey!” Rigsy begins, frowning. 

“She’s not the Mayor of Trap Street, she hasn’t been for a long time,” explains Clara. 

“Yes, and if you were to, stupidly, go back there, you would find that I am still there. Uptight gothic phase and all.”

“Whereas now she’s all sort of garbage-dump grunge,” Clara smirks. 

“It was the end of the universe,” Me replies, tilting her head and mocking offence. 

“The end of fashion too?”

“Yes, actually, that’s sort of the point.”

“Hang on, hang on. Stop.” Rigsy cuts in, resting his fist against the table and pressing his eyes shut. 

“That’s Ashildr – the Mayor – from nearly five billion years in the future,” Clara tells him. Me punctuates the explanation by raising her mug and winking at Rigsy. 

“You really are immortal,” he breathes. 

“Best we get on, Clara,” she says, not unkindly. “And thank you for the coffee.”

“Yeah,” Rigsy mumbles, sarcastic. “Don’t mention it.”

An idea coming to her, Clara addresses Rigsy. “Hey, could I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he replies, sympathy flooding back into his dark eyes. 

Clara’s gaze is fixated on a canvas affixed to the far wall. It was obscured by the closed kitchen door when she walked through earlier, and the picture dominates the cluttered, speckled countertops. A painting of thick greens and creams and dark blues that render a darkened tunnel and a spindly figure with arched brows, its hand outstretched. Dark shapes shift in thick swaths of paint at the edges, dispelled by the green glow. The Doctor, saving the world. The shadows of his face are recognisable even from a distance. 

Clara smiles and looks back at Rigsy. “What are your commission prices?”

Ashildr assures Rigsy that, having established a connection with this precise location in space-time, they can plant an anchor and return a microsecond after they depart. He doesn’t trust her without Clara’s agreement. She really hopes that Ashldr knows what she’s doing. One would hope that, after billions of years, that’s something that one learns.

Together, they retrieve the Doctor’s TARDIS from Trap Street by materialising their steel cylinder TARDIS around it. The doors of the phone box are scorched and scratched with what Clara assumes are the younger Ashildr’s attempts to break it open. The doors crack ajar at Clara’s touch, and the Doctor’s ship welcomes her with a quiet trill as the engines power up. 

Ashildr finds the Doctor’s TARDIS controls difficult and unresponsive, as petulant as young Lucy, whining on the walk home. She aims to move the ship outside of the street, to some parking lot or abandoned block where Rigsy might work undisturbed. Enclosed in the ship, the Doctor’s TARDIS bucks like an untrained mule, upsetting their stolen engine’s stomach, and they end up tossed over to the next continent on the eastern side of Nevada. 

Clara exits the white console room to find that the exterior has transformed itself into a tacky American diner. There is a pair of too-short blue dresses hanging around the back of the bar, pinafores and all. 

In the console room, Rigsy works, having carted his paints with him from home. 

He insists he will do the job for free, since the Doctor saved his life twice, but then Clara reminds him, rather sternly, that the only reason he had been dragged into the events on Trap Street in the first place was that the Mayor needed a way to trap the Doctor, so he will be receiving full payment thank-you-very-much. 

Reluctantly, he agrees. 

The TARDIS makes no protest against the paint. First, he covers up the scorch marks and faded, chipped paint with a fresh blue coat. Then he begins to decorate the exterior with intertwining strokes of vibrant colour; verdant vines spotted with blooming flowers. After a while, Clara leaves him to his business, music blaring in his headphones. Me is at work on the TARDIS instruction manual, deciphering the dense Gallifreyan text. Clara heads to the Zero Room, and watches the Doctor sleep. 

_She wakes, still in her clothes and shoes. There is a plate of Jammy-Dodgers on her bedside table, and there is a strange man sitting outside her window clothed in an old-fashioned purple suit. It’s better than the brown sack he arrived in, raving madly on her doorstep. He grins up at her, surrounded by the spinning dishes and blinking lights of whirring machinery. He tells her that he took care of everything – scribed her Dad’s rant about the government, saw Angie off the stay at her mate’s, and invented a quadricycle._

_Maybe, just maybe, this lunatic is alright. He seems to mean well, and he did save her life from a spoon-headed robot. Clara just had the strangest nightmare of her life. She was information, trapped in a labyrinth of minds._

_“Are you guarding me?” she asks the Doctor, bemused, quizzical, maybe a tiny bit swept-off-her-feet._

_He smiles smugly in return, and adjusts his bowtie. “Yes. Yes I am.”_

Her life, flashing before her eyes. The Doctor won’t remember that, or anything that came after. Meanwhile, her head feels wonky, like she is staring down from a great height. Perhaps the neuroblock did some damage after all. It might be that, or the whole being-dead thing. She resists the urge to ask the Doctor what she’s supposed to do next. 

Clara looks at him, the old man resting upon a bed of empty air, and wonders who he will be when he wakes up. She was the first thing he ever saw. When he opened those new eyes for the first time, her’s were waiting, and she has been by his side ever since. When he wakes, what’s going to be left? 

In his sleep, the Doctor stirs. 

What if he’s nothing at all? Left as he was when she first met him face to face and wondering when his hair became so grey. Not at the house in London, but before, and in a flash of sensation she dimly recalls it; moping on a cloud in Victorian London, and mourning a lost family. Something about the white room is making her feel dizzy. She tears herself away. 

She voices her concerns to Me, who dispels them. Apparently that’s not how it works. Time Lord technology makes artistry of erasure, they will cut her out of his life with grace and precision and care. Me can be surprisingly comforting when she wants to be. Warm, even. Beyond the age in her eyes lurks curiosity and compassion. It reminds her of someone who used to know her. 

Rigsy completes his piece with a portrait of Clara, scratched in whites and blacks and pale blues upon the front panels of the TARDIS. He does it by memory, as if he’s painted her face many times before. 

Clara goes inside the TARDIS, and leaves a message on the blackboard, to remind him, to hold him to the mark. Her hand shakes as she drags the chalk across its surface. 

_Run you clever boy, and be a doctor._

Any memories he forms now, Me tells Clara, will be fuzzy and soon fade. They have a few hours. Me’s initial plan is to leave him in the desert with his newly-painted TARDIS, but Clara has another idea. She wants to talk to him one last time. 

They drop Rigsy home, and Clara promises that they will see each other again soon. Lucy is singing a pitchy lullaby to her baby sister upstairs. 

Clara’s final meeting with the Doctor reminds her of just how much she really doesn’t want to be dead. Between here and the end of the universe, there are one-hundred-and-one places to see. Her pulse is still, but she can almost pretend it’s racing if she doesn’t think about it, if she just keeps on going. It’s what she’s best at. 

She leaves him behind, wiping the fifth set of impossible tears from her eyes, as he plays a song she can’t help but find unbearably sad. 

Me warns her that the Time Lords are sure to follow wherever they run. She made a deal with them on Trap Street to protect her little pocket of anachronistic creatures, and protect herself from their meddling fingers that itched to put her timeline right. The contract is void now. The universe has already ended once. 

She wonders what might have happened if the neuroblock had worked on her instead of the Doctor. He would be forgotten, of course, but would her heart have started? Would she have lived, as Me was forced to, alone and immortal? There might have been a room in the TARDIS with her face on a board, from which he could watch her grow, alone, judge her deeds, and keep the Time Lords at bay. More likely, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. 

In the way he talked, of the gang boss that was really called Rassilon, and the basement of torture instruments that was really a confession dial, Clara could see the weariness on his face. Not pain, not horror, just fatigue _._ As he said, distance makes the hearts grow fonder, but perhaps four-and-a-half billion years of half-remembered torture will be enough to stop that fondness from quickening, and growing between his ribs anew. Maybe he will finally stop caring, stop looking, and run away – not to home, just _away._ It’s what he does best, and what he loves best. 

So does she – because the job and the flat and the bills and the half-baked friendships were only ever holding her back. 

This is a convenient lie, in a way she does not want to admit. She does care, and she always will. She will always miss Coal Hill and her barmy Dad and the Blackpool coastline and Danny Pink. 

Perhaps, just as unchangeably, the Doctor will always miss Gallifrey. 

Old memories of hers are starting to trickle back, a steady runoff from the summit at the height of the pit. The timestream, the trash chute. It makes her head hurt. 

Reengineering the neuroblock, Me smooths it all over, just as the Doctor did to her long ago, and then to himself, cutting around the shapes of one another. Despite her insistence upon solitude – singular, unattached – Me is glad of Clara’s company, and tells her as much, during their first days spent wandering the wide universe, during which the destination of Gallifrey looms. Like one of her students, diligently putting off any semblance of work, she becomes skilled at ignoring the inevitable crunch. 

She tells herself sternly, like a message dashed across a primordial blackboard; _chin up Oswin._

_Come along Clara._

**The Rings of Akhaten, 7560 BTW**

Oswin holds her hands over the girl’s eyes, leading her forward across the meteor’s surface step by cautious step. 

“That’s it, right there,” says Oswin. Lucy smiles broadly below Oswin’s palms. “That is the light of an alien sun. Are you ready?”

Lucy balls up her fists at her sides, as if bracing for impact. Her white jeans were an impractical choice for Akhaten with all its red dust, and the teenager’s calves are already covered in remnants of the low-swirling dust clouds that permeate the gravity belt. 

“Yep, okay,” Lucy says. “Ready.” 

Oswin lifts her hands from her eyes. 

Her gasp of wonder is all the answer Oswin needs. It’s been many decades for herself and Me, on the road, on the run, but it’s the first time that she has been back to Akhaten since her very first visit. It seems a fitting first outing for Lucy, the eighteen-year-old student from the planet Earth. 

Decades – that’s longer spent dead than alive. It doesn’t feel like it. 

“Welcome,” Oswin says grandly, “to the Rings of Akhaten.” 

She and Lucy visit the marketplace some few hundred years before the Queen of Years will be carried off to the Golden Pyramid, and the Old God destroyed. It’s a quiet day, compared to the once-in-a-thousand years festivities, but there are still plenty of alien visitors from the surrounding systems for Lucy to marvel at. They try delicacies of ranging edibility, speak snippets of half-translated languages, and walk the winding trail from the market, to the village, and up to the gates of the Time Palace, its bulbous red towers intricately patterned in gilded golds and sterling, green parapets and stout blue towers accented with sea-foam white. It looks like something you might find in Moscow, only larger and stranger and slightly shifting the fabric of time around the eyes of the observer. 

As they stare up at the palace, Lucy says to Oswin, in a challenging tone. “My Dad says you’re as old as the moon.”

“Oh,’ Oswin smiles, keeping an air of mystery about her. “Not just yet. Besides, your Dad says a lot of things.” 

“Mm,” Lucy agrees peaceably, and drags her by the arm to the next attraction. 

Although she promised she would only be taking Lucy for a quick trip, and then straight back home for the festivities, Oswin takes her to a few not-frankly-necessary pit-stops on the way back to Earth. 

In the end, it’s Lucy that requests that they head home. Me, their chauffeur, and far from happy about it, obliges, and they return to Earth. 

“I don’t want to miss it,” Lucy tells Oswin sympathetically, because Oswin has been quite obvious about wanting her to stay for another adventure or two. “Otherwise I’d never forgive myself.”

“It’s a time machine. You’ll never miss anything ever again.”

“I know, I just…” Lucy stares guiltily down at her shoes. Over the years, Converse have remained doggedly in-fashion. “I want to be there.” 

So does Oswin, but she’s much better at running than facing things head on. It is becoming harder, the longer she runs, to be brave. She feels like she is circumventing a prophecy of her own; a set-in-stone fact, fast approaching. The prophecy-makers are not red-robed matriarchs or a computer full of ghosts, just the uncaring face of the universe. Fate’s gnarled hand. 

Christopher Riggins is dying. 

Perhaps it’s about time, in human standards. He’s ninety-seven. 

The thing about TARDISes, at least, newly-stolen TARDISes, unused to renegade life, is that they like to retain some semblance of linearity with the worlds they frequent. Spend a decade away, and you’ll be hard-pressed to return anything less than two years after you left. It’s as if a bubble exists around the ship and lingers wherever it lands. They don’t like to cross. A few hours, that’s inconsequential, and the anchor point will hold. Beyond that, things aren’t quite as certain, and Me is not the most reliable pilot. 

Oswin watched her Gran die in 2025, and her Dad in 2049, and she was there, lurking at the back of the service, for Doctor Courtney Woods in 2086. Now, in 2090, it’s Rigsy’s go, and his great granddaughter, named for her grandmother, and great grandmother’s grandmother, does not want to miss his final moments. Me has often asked her why she puts herself through the slow, sombre torture of funerals. To remind her, Oswin tells her. To hold her to the mark. 

She has visited the Doctor as well, though it took her a while to track him down. Apparently he can do deep-cover, if he extends himself. He taught at a university in Bristol throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. He taught, with grand speeches and blackboards and white chalk strokes long after the technique went out of fashion, as if the medium comforted him. As if it reminded him of someone he could not remember. Oswin has not spoken to him, and deliberately lost track of what happened to him after that. Some things are too painful to imagine, let alone witness. Presumably, a Doctor is still around, still travelling the universe with lucky humans, and still not remembering anything about her. As is customary, the invasions are stopped, the odd Dalek incursion solved and subsequently covered up with a mixture of the Doctor’s meddling and good old fashioned human forgetfulness, and all is as all should be. 

2090 is quite like 2015, but with more screens. Rigsy will die in bed, beside his family – his two daughters and their children and their children’s children – with a timer counting down. Like a Chronolock, ticking back to zero. That is how much time his cells have been given, suspended in a cryogenic state to allow him time to say his last goodbyes. In reality, cancer took him a week prior. They allowed apt time for his family to make their way across the globe. 

Maybe 2090 is nothing like 2015 after all. It’s not as if Oswin can really remember. 

Experiences don’t seem to stick. There is no background processing to cement their contents, no archiving, no upkeep. Things simply happen, they wash over, then they stop happening, and their impressions are soon vague. They do not fade as such, but in recollection are plucked from a tangle of disjointed moments that swim about her ears. 

Oswin is greeted, upon her arrival to Rigsy’s small suburban house in Somerset, diner parked in the empty lot down the street, by the smiles of people trying in vain to be cheerful. 

There will be a proper funeral next week. 

They tell stories about her, in this big family of Rigsy’s, and the truth has long since been lost. How many children can boast that their grandfather’s strange bedtime stories are true? A raven woman, or a time traveller, or an immortal. Older than the moon, according to Lucy’s Dad, which is a nice story if entirely inaccurate. She stops by every once in a while, for Christmases and birthdays and regular Tuesdays, but leaves before any of the younger, distant, more skeptical sorts in the family can catch onto the impossibility of her continued, unexplained presence in the crowd, and they can live in plausible assurance that it must be some sort of coincidence. She could tell, as the years ran on, that Rigsy was beginning to wonder if she would ever return to Gallifrey. In all honesty, she had been beginning to wonder about that herself. Until today. Until she was faced by the sight of the tasteless black balloons and plastered smiles and the ticking clock on the monitor by Rigsy’s makeshift hospital bed as it ticked down, second-by-second, in wireframe green. 

Now she knows that it is the first thing she will do as soon as she leaves this house. 

He is conscious, but barely. Lucid would be a stretch. He mumbles something to her about local knowledge and a hairband and a subway tunnel. This part at the end, the borrowed moments, are more for the family than for the dying. 

The canvases that line his walls are strange, colourful, intricate things. More abstract shape than solid image, like he’s Picassoed. 

Oswin tells him this, which makes him smile.

“I met Picasso,” she tells him, with a wry grin. “He was an ass.” 

Oswin hangs back as his family says goodbye. Lucy-the-second plants a gentle kiss on Rigsy’s wrinkled forehead, the red sands of Akhaten still clinging to the cuffs of her jeans. Oswin hears her tell him all about it; the marketplace and spires and sun-singers. 

When the green clock reads zero-zero-zero, mimicking the tattoo on her neck, a tear runs down Oswin’s cheek. That’s six times. Six impossible bouts of quantum crying. She’s banked a great deal on Rigsy, on his life, on his death. It goes past sentimentality, right though the philosophical, and into the domain of the ideologically obsessive. He is the one that she died to save. If he dies, then what was the point of her sacrifice? It’s a wakeup call disguised as a death toll. She has been running for far too long already. 

Slowly, family filters from the room. They edge past her as if they can’t see her, which isn’t a new phenomenon. The untrained eye tends to skate over the impossible. Lucy-the-second fixes her with a searching look.

“Are you going to come back?” she asks. She’s beautiful, and perceptive, and intelligent – just the Doctor’s type. She’s studying disaster management, which is the sort of professional Oswin could really use by her side. 

She should probably lie. “No,” she says instead, staring at a vibrant dash of coloured cubes and geometric vigour painted on a canvas above the headboard. “Probably not.”

“Oh, well then, thanks for the alien stuff,” Lucy smiles. Her eyes are red with tears. 

When she leaves, Oswin walks over to Rigsy’s beside. They’re supposed to wait for the removalists. They’ll take away the machines, too, with its zero-zero-zero screen. Oswin holds his withered hand in her own. Two dead bands pressed together. The warmth of her palm does not pass into his. Oswin sits there until she hears a truck pull up outside. 

Footsteps approach, and Oswin expects that one of Rigsy’s family members has come to pry her away. It’s Me. Her eyes are round and sympathetic, and her face is far too wide. 

“Are you here to tell me it gets easier?” Oswin asks bitterly. 

“I could, but it would be a lie.” Me places a gentle hand on Oswin’s shoulder. “It never does.” 

Oswin’s voice comes out curt, short, cold, “You don’t even remember.” 

She squeezes Oswin’s shoulder. softly “We should go.”

“Yes,” Oswin murmurs, her eyes lost in the lines of Rigsy’s face. “We should.” Me releases her grip, and she starts to walk away. 

“We should go back to Gallifrey. I’m ready. Take me back.” Oswin speaks quickly, and that makes it easier to get the words out. She hears Me stop, her boots scuffing on the carpet. 

“Are you sure?”

Oswin lets her grip fall from Rigsy’s hand. It hangs, drooping toward the carpet. “Yes.” 

Me tells her that it’s going to take some time to run a sweep, and search for Gallifrey’s current coordinates. Apparently it no longer resides at the end of the universe linearly, but has once again sequestered itself in a bubble universe to buy itself more time, and continue to live past the end of reality. Oswin doesn’t have the energy to be curious about how this can be. 

As the TARDIS calculates their route, they stop off at a few new places, some of them for the reviews afforded by the intergalactic equivalents of tripadvisor – beautiful resorts and natural, sublime phenomena – and some for the distress calls, which are much more fun. It’s what they would be doing ordinarily, in between the rare Earth visits and jaunts through familiar history. Oswin can almost pretend that Rigsy is still alive and waiting to hear about her adventures. 

After a long day of running through spaceship corridors with their uniform, science-fiction sheens, and never growing tired, Oswin stares at the monitor on the TARDIS, watching the percentage of the sweep’s completion tick on up. Eighty-three percent. Is she eighty-three percent ready to face her demise? She feels Rigsy’s grip like that of a ghost against laced through her fingers, and thinks that she definitely should be. 

Should be, but isn’t. Going back would be giving up, and giving in. It would be easy, and it would be over, and like the thought of an exit as she sat in a sitting room suffocated with flowers and condolences, it is strangely comforting. Going back would be quitting, and losing, and cowardice. These things are against her nature. 

Me enters the console room and tries to pretend she isn’t watching Oswin intently as she takes her place at the controls.

“I was thinking...” Oswin broaches, in the casual way a partner might bring up the subject of an old argument. Wary, guarded. She twirls her ponytail between her fingers. “Maybe we could put the whole Gallifrey thing on hold, just for a little longer.”

Me turns to her with a pompous air. It goes above and beyond the level of her natural pompous state, which is an impressive feat. “There it is,” she smiles. 

“There what is?” With a tap of a button, a flourish of Me’s manicured fingers, the percentage on the screen flickers off. “Oh,” Oswin mutters, feeling stupid. The considerable rise in both adrenaline level and general quality of their past few outings suddenly makes a great deal of sense. “There was no sweep, was there.”

“No.” Me looks down at the controls, smirking. 

“But how did you know –”

“That you’d change your mind?” She leans against the console’s edge. Me’s smile is wry and knowing and as beautiful as it is annoying. “I’ve been told that it does that, from time to time.” 

From the centre of the console, the light flares a gentle shade of lilac. Oswin has been noticing these subtle changes, small ways in which the ship is beginning to mould itself to its captors. She has begun to notice cushions and windows appearing in convenient places, along with books she never brought aboard. 

“Don’t go on about it,” Oswin mutters fondly. “It was just a wobble. Planets, yeah?”

Me’s smile broadens. “Of course.”

Before there is time for a more in-depth discussion, before there is any danger of another whim passing through, and changing Oswin’s mind back around again, they leave for the next beckoning wonder of the universe. 

They do not go back to Gallifrey. 

Something shifts in Oswin after that, with nothing to tie her to the Earth. She finds herself contemplating the breadth of time ahead of her, and finds herself hopelessly embroiled in her very own beginning of possibly-infinite-life crisis. She steals her motorbike back from the storage shed they put it after Clara Oswald died. She tries to teach herself to play guitar, but the skills don’t seem to cement themselves, and her fingers are too short. Oswin sticks to saving worlds, to keeping people safe, and lying to them when she can’t.

She discovers things about herself and what her scattered echoes, like so many abandoned children, accomplished during their short, tragic lives. She scours over their faces in the biggest library in the universe, guided by a kindly, blonde-haired interface beneath the light of a mechanical moon. Oswin’s face, and her name, butchered though it is by the memories as they splintered and faded, crops up across all times and cultures, planets and parallel worlds. 

Oswin forges a legend of her own. Scholars of temporal phenomena guess that she is the original, the whole being from which the echoes were sloughed in some seismic blast. There are rumours that she is an eternal, a Time Lord, a renegade, a beast. She erases herself where she can, with Me’s help. 

They remain anonymous when they tire of notoriety, and become notorious when they tire of anonymity. They spend time apart when they tire of one another's anger, and time together when the loneliness begins to drag and, when she tires of the strangeness of the stars, Oswin returns to Earth. 

She drags hapless, enraptured humans in her wake, and only some of them die. 

She dodges agent after agent, sent from the dwindling Gallifreyan population at the end of time. Some are evaded or killed. One of them she marries. After a while, either they give up, or Oswin gets better at covering her tracks. 

She and Me are partners in all senses of the word – in business and romance and crime. 

They are lovers, in a far-above-the-gutter sort of way. Oswin lacks the necessary natural processes to partake in the activities associated with – as Missy called it – her noisy little food chain. 

There are ups and downs, as with any life. She ebbs into apathy, which flows back upon the shore sympathetic and repentant and disgusted. There are times when she wishes she were dead, and times when she feels more alive than ever, and seeks each new thrill knowing it is deserved, because she is owed. After everything she has done for the universe, it _owes_ her this.

Through it all, malcontent and anger swell like a lump in her throat, washed away by tears of remorse and self-loathing, but always returning, like calluses or kidney stones or ulcers that will never grow upon her frozen body, made of bitterness and boredom. 

Through it all, she isn’t sure whether she should be thanking him or telling him off. 

They were wrong – they both were – about travelling, and origins, and the feelings that fester between the fault lines of the perpetual journey in between. 

Distance makes the heart grow colder.

**Gallifrey, ~** **4.5E+09 ATW**

The prisoner leads her captor out of the silver capsule and across the desert. She could be back in Utah, if it weren’t for the twin suns and the looming bulb of the citadel ahead, casting its round shadow over the withered landscape. 

Oswin has never seen the citadel from afar, at least not in the flesh. Its glass shield reflects the clear burnt sky in a dull sheen, like the surface of a still pond. Its towers are dirty, twisted and bared like rusted teeth. She can see the point at which some of them were snapped off and hastily rounded off in an imitation of old grandeur in the aftermath of war. It reminds her of the castles dotting the English countryside; willows weeping by mud-caked moats, old stone parapets moss-covered and crumbling. An old stoic thing, scarred by forgotten battles. 

Behind her, John – or Operative 9613, which she will not be calling him – stops short, the scuffling of his ridiculous wedged boots against the hard-packed sand fading into silence. Oswin turns, attempting to soften her expression. The truth is, she is desperately afraid, and her anger is the only thing able to compete, and cover it up. It’s sure to be contentious. Somehow, after all this time, she is still afraid to die. 

Oswin remembers thinking, down in the cloisters facing the General, the soldier and the priestess, that her hatred for the Time Lords in that moment was unparalleled. She was wrong. She wants nothing more than to turn around, grab John by the shoulders, and tell him to run. Perhaps what she has told him already is enough to fracture time and split a hole in the universe. Frankly she doesn’t care. The integrity of time has never been of particular concern to her. 

The TARDIS landed a mile or so away from the citadel, some mixture of wariness and rebelliousness and humiliation sending it into a sulk. Oswin will miss it, even if it won’t miss her. She thinks of the books inside, blinking out of existence. The orange oil lamps and vibrant cushions and memories, unmade. 

“I suppose you have questions,” Oswin calls to her captor in a conversational tone. 

He looks as if he wants to cry. Rather, he looks as if he would hate nothing more than to give into the urge, and is doing an awful job at hiding it. His shoulders are stiff and his eyes stare blankly. John starts to walk again, stiff and stilted. Another deep pang of sympathy, and Oswin finds herself, despite her fear and death and old age, with more than enough capacity to feel its sting. 

“I’m sorry,” she adds, though she isn’t sure what she is apologising for. That he has been forced to face his planet’s barren future, that she has reminded him of all the memories numbed and brushed away by his conditioning, that she has called his loyalties into question, perhaps many centuries too early. Or, perhaps, sorry on behalf of the monsters, and all they have done to him. It doesn’t really matter. John isn’t listening. He walks past her, leading the way to the citadel. 

Part of her still wants to run; make off into the desolation, take wing toward the orange horizon. There are other cities on Gallifrey, and it isn’t as if she has to worry about falling to exposure or exhaustion. She could run, just as she could have abandoned John on an asteroid in the gravity belt orbiting Akhaten, just as she could have kept the doors to her TARDIS control room firmly shut, and just as she could have remained silent, instead of offering John a bowl of chips despite the sympathy he stirred in her chest. 

There are certain privileges afforded to her, existing outside of time. She has no sanity to break, no consciousness to trap, so much time lived to pull against that it counterbalances the thousands of echo lives lived and half-forgotten. She doesn’t feel the strain of it on her mind, because she has no mind to strain. No heat, no melting force as synapses burst like firecrackers spewing electrical excrete through her brain. If she were still alive, it would be leaking through her ears by now, as her chest collapsed upon heaving lungs and a heart beating too fast to track, and mind reeling back...

She cannot die, and so, it does not kill her. Funny how that works. 

“Tell me what happened,” John says. Low, curt, commanding – all of this he tries to embody, but his request is hollow and scared.

Oswin tells him what little she knows, and time does not break. 

At the city gates, there is a welcome party. It holds nothing to the committee that the Doctor described to her in the diner that no longer exists, disguised within a Mafia metaphor, but it’s a decent pull for a human. John leads her now, mulling over broken tales of the war, passed from his future self to Oswin, and back into his past. Would she even feel it, if time were to snap? More likely there is a neuroblock waiting somewhere in the city with his name on it, whatever that might be. 

The city gates stand open, awaiting their approach. A scratched, weathered bronze wall rings the city, and stretches around a circumference so large that from her position it seems straight. Five figures stand darkly against the grimy brown light of the undercity beyond, and the broken towers that rise from the centre snapped and shining. Oswin wonders how long they’ve been standing here, waiting for them to make the long trek over. She isn’t sure how long it has been since she left from the planet’s perspective. Perhaps it isn’t something one can measure, drifting in a reality bubble outside of time and space. A snow globe sitting on a dark matter shelf. 

In the centre of the formation, the General stands in her maroon armour. Oswin wonders if she wears it around the clock, or in the shower. The ungainly plastic plates are bound to chafe. Even more amusing to Oswin is the idea that she might have put it on especially, just for the trip down the street and up again. It’s flattering. Beside the General there are two pairs of chancellery guards helmeted in off-crimson spheres, stone-faced. It’s as if their armour has been sitting in the cupboard, their colourful veneers fading over time. Maybe they have. 

Ahead, John bows curtly to the General, and to his credit does well to hide the quivering in his knees. The General nods amicably in return. She straightens up and smiles stiffly at Oswin. It’s the same regeneration – brown skin, buzzed hair, large, black eyes. She seems not to have aged, though that in no way indicates the passage of time. The energy that fuels their lives is malleable, shaped and folded and wielded like molten gold by those highly-ranked enough to hold the privilege. 

Oswin forces a grim smile in return. Too much teeth; she feels like a wild animal, caught, snarling. “General,” Oswin cries, giving her a lazy salute. “You came. I was hoping you would.” She bounces up to stand beside John, still half-bent in genuflection, and does not bow.

“Miss Oswald,” the General replies in a curt tone. “You are, unfortunately, my responsibility.” No respectful nod for her. “Operative,” she addresses John, “you will be escorted to the TARDIS bay and program your return to Division headquarters. Thank you for your service.”

For one exhilarating moment, John opens his mouth as if to say something, but he lowers his head in yet another half-bow, and does not say a word. One of the pairs of guards step forwards and extend sombre nods of their own. Oswin feels as if she is watching a curious new form of communication. Nods pass serious between their heads, the gesture ricocheting from one to the other like a pinball. 

It is clear from the guarded, tense body language of everyone present that this is not a matter of choice. If necessary, John will be taken by force if necessary, not that he would ever be so foolish as to resist. Not yet anyway. John looks back as he is led away. 

“Remember what I told you, yeah?” Oswin prompts, winking at him. He hurriedly looks away and trains his eyes on the dead city before him. 

In front of her, the General raises an eyebrow in calm intrigue. 

“Oh,” Oswin says casually, “just told him not to take candy from strangers. Remember to wear sunscreen. Standard advice.”

Imperceptibly, the General’s eyes flicker towards a roll, but she controls herself. 

“You have been quite difficult to apprehend, Miss Oswald.” 

Oswin smiles bitterly. “Thanks, I try my best” 

The General nods to her remaining pair of guards, but they do not move. Their expressions, though shadowed into clayish uniformity beneath their ungainly helmets, twist in unease. 

Oswin raises her eyebrows, gazing up at them with all the strangeness she can muster. A thousand deaths flash behind her eyes. “Something wrong?”

With a scowl and a more forceful nod, the General spurs her guards into action. They obey, and one of them takes a thin silver disc from his belt the size of a large coin. Walking towards her, he presses it to the skin of Oswin’s arm. A paralysing current runs down the limb and across her shoulder blades, reaching down to the fingertips of both arms. They are rendered numb, stiff, and inert. Better than handcuffs. She wonders how often they get an excuse to use all their fancy gadgets out here. With great personal effort, Oswin does not resist. 

“Well those are nifty,” Oswin remarks, nodding towards the belt inlaid with similar, coin-like devices. At first glance, they look like a simple embellishment on their ridiculous armour. “A paralysis field that works on me, now there’s something new. I had a streak going.” 

The guards stand either side of Oswin, turning to face the open gates and the General with only a slight tremor to their poise. 

“Like a walking, talking Neverwere,” the General mutters, half to Oswin, half to herself in disgusted disbelief. She clears her throat. “Tolerate their apprehension.”

“Running a bit low on tolerance, actually,” Oswin retorts, but the General looks away, impatient, and leads the way into the city. It is sure to be a long walk. Plenty of time to get her affairs in order. 

The streets are desolate, though she sees the odd face in the odd, cracked window. The odd vehicle trundling tiredly along the chipped roads. The buildings seem to slope upwards, growing larger as they reach the base of the citadel as if clamouring for its grace, reaching toward its spires. It creates a curious landscape; a pyramid of ruined buildings, some repaired and others left to charred abandon, supporting the great marble at the centre of the labyrinth, within with the suns wink as they drift behind the slender backs of bronze towers. 

As they walk, one of the guards wrinkles their nose. 

“Don’t get out and about often, then,” Oswin asks him, though beyond a shiver he does not acknowledge her. 

“It is not customary, no,” the General answers on his behalf. 

“You could have brought the TARDIS right inside, parked it in its regular spot. I mean there were the defences on the ship, but you could have circumvented those once it came within range of the planet. Easy done.”

“Yes, we could have,” the General agrees.

“But…” Oswin thinks for a moment. It isn’t a procession to the gallows, there isn't a crowd. This is not a spectacle, in fact, from the furtive glances that the guards are casting about, and the minimal crew sent to meet them, Oswin gathers that it’s an ordeal they want to keep quiet. It wouldn’t do for word to get out that the Time Lord’s fabled extraction chambers have escapees, collateral damage. It suggests that they can be outwitted, overpowered, that their laws of time are flimsy, circumventable by a mere human. “But you were afraid of letting me in. Of what I might do.” 

“You?” the General says derisively. She almost laughs, but is altogether too uptight for such expressions of emotion. “They were more worried about him.” Oswin understands the truth with a bitter smile. Even this long-buried version, who follows rules to the letter and can barely string together a cover story, scares them just by virtue of who he will someday become. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?” she asks the General flatly. 

“It doesn’t matter either way,” she replies, and her indifference is infuriating. “It got you here in the end.”

“But why? Why resort to him?” The whole situation is peculiar, overwrought, convoluted. She is missing something. 

“Would you have come back for anything less? Anyone less?” the General fixes her with a pointed stare, then with a small, satisfied smirk she turns to face the dilapidated streets, her heavy coat billowing behind her. She strikes a grand figure, striding along the battered road, as if she herself conquered the city, and now stalks the ruins. 

“Fair point,” Oswin shrugs. “Do you not care about the safety of time anymore? You’re just going to reach across someone’s established timeline and wrench them on forward to undo some security measures. Seems desperate.”

“It all simulated scenarios, it was the only viable choice.” So, desperate it is. Maybe she should be flattered. All she can manage is suspicion. 

“Simulated scenarios?”

“In the Matrix.”

“Oh, that old thing” Oswin huffs under her breath, at her sand-covered, once-white trainers. 

The dust is a constant on this planet, even within the city gates. It blows about her calves in a sharp, stinging current. They walk for a long time before Oswin speaks again, and she is again left to wonder why they couldn’t just take down her ship’s defences. The suspense is killing her. 

“Did you always know?” Oswin asks the General. The citadel is closer, probably. It’s hard to tell with the scale of this place. “Did they all know, the high council or whatever. All that time, and kept it a secret. Not just from him, from everybody.” The Doctor told her about his childhood on Gallifrey – was all that a lie as well? A fabrication to mask the awful truth. 

“The secret was uncovered only recently, so no. I did not know. It was a closely guarded truth, by Rassilon himself.” 

“And he told you – what, before his exile?”

“Of course not.”

“So... how?”

“Quite honestly, Miss Oswald, I don’t see how it is any of your concern.”

Oswin stops walking. “Oh, it’s of my concern, don’t you worry. I am more than concerned, I am furious.”

“It happened millions of years ago,” the General says, stopping and turning to face Oswin. They are at an intersection, brown monotony stretching on in four directions. “I am no more responsible for it than for the genocidal atrocities committed by your human forefathers. Less so, in fact. I am no more responsible for it than you are for the Neanderthal’s slow extinction. I’ll tell you what does plague my conscience,” – she takes a step nearer, in clunky, armoured boots – “the war, and all those who died in its fire, and those who still rightly blame me and the remnants of the council for all that happened. It is more practical to feel guilt for the deeds for which I am responsible, don’t you think? And more practical for you to agonise over all the lives you ended on your way back to us.” The General turns back around and resumes her trek. 

“My anger is justified,” Oswin says. She feels it like nothing she has felt in thousands of years. As sure as a heartbeat, it pulses. She slots in step behind the General, and beside the guards.

“Your anger is misplaced. It would be better served to Rassilon himself,” the General calls, “though that would be useless. He is long since exiled to the fringes of time.”

“Don’t tell me what to feel,” Oswin mutters, petulant. Even to her ears, she sounds like a child. “But I suppose everyone knows the truth now. Even them, seeing as we’re talking so freely,” Oswin adds, voice low. She indicates the silent guard to her right, who is unwilling or simply forbidden to speak up. 

“The deepest recesses of the Matrix were mined, and old secrets uncovered. There is no sense in keeping them anymore.” Honesty comes before the end, Oswin thinks. An old empire, sorting through their worldly regrets on their deathbed. 

Her anger is justified. It belongs, sharp and deadly, aimed towards the monsters. The ones who hide away outside the universe because of the hatred and fear harboured for them in every known corner of the universe. She remembers, in her plethora of echo memories, planets upon which the Time Lords were the villains of a popular mythos, adapted and re-adapted, morphed into a cultural scapegoat of all evil, into idioms and wives tales and satellite drama series. She remembers fighting in their war, a soldier who proudly wore their mark, and of toiling in the Dalek camps, and of perishing upon a world caught in the nightmarish crossfire of the creatures spawned from the lawless laboratories of both sides. She remembers living on this planet twice; once near its very beginning, and again a few millennia off the cusp of its heyday, a technician sanctioned only one life in the city’s bowels. Her anger is justified, and not just on behalf of the Doctor. She spends a while wallowing in it, and though she, in death, is beyond exhaustion, she marvels at the General and the guards’ ability to walk at their brisk, upright pace for so long. 

Oswin notes the scorch marks upon the buildings, as if stained by laser blast, and the crude Gallifreyan symbols scrawled messily in paints and inks upon the walls. She knows angry graffiti when she sees it, having painted over her fair share on her classroom walls. There have been riots, skirmishes, small-scale wars right here on home soil, in plain view of whatever remains of the high council. If this is the state of the capital, she wonders who rules the other cities now. 

“How long was I gone?” Oswin asks the General. It is cold now, in the shadow of the snow globe. 

“For Gallifrey, it has been nearly a thousand years.”

Oswin scoffs, and derisively says, “Only?”

“And for you?” Oswin might be imagining a hint of concern in the General’s rigid tone, for the integrity of time, no doubt. Looking forward to the looming task of cleaning up the mess she has made of causality since her escape. Perhaps it’s just the General and her soldiers and the odd CIA agent she has encountered while on the run, but every Gallifrey-based Time Lord Oswin has met have shared an aspect of this stiffness, like their faces are made of stone, and their thoughts equally smoothed to featurelessness, as if by the current of a lapping, persistent stream. Even John shares the aspect somewhat, though it began to unravel during their final conversation. A mask stuck tight to the face, absorbed into the skin over the years until it becomes a permanent feature of the musculature. 

Oswin has no idea how long it has been for her. “Longer,” she says, and hopes that the word comes across world-weary and impressively vague. 

“So what’ve you been up to in the last thousand-ish years because, no offence, but it doesn’t look like you’ve been doing a whole lot since, well… since the war, judging by all the missing bits.” And no maintenance since; the roads are potholed, the windows dirty, the metal shells of the buildings rusted. The Doctor told her that they had automated systems for these sorts of menial tasks, but evidently those systems have since fallen into disrepair. 

The General sighs. It is the one loose, expressive thing about her; weary, drawn-out sighs. “Longer time scales beget longer timelines,” she says. “Nothing is agreed upon, nothing is done. Arguments precur action in all regards.”

“Sounds like the PTA,” Oswin mutters. It’s a good enough explanation, but it doesn’t seem to quite fit. It does not explain their decision not to take down her ship’s defences, afraid of the Doctor’s precursor or not, or the furtive passage through the city on foot. It feels archaic, medieval – altogether nothing like the grand, unknowable beings with technology usurping all imaginings of magic that the Doctor always touted when asked about the race he first mourned, and then searched for. 

“You’ve done well for yourself, though,” Oswin remarks, trying to keep things cheerful. “Kept your post, despite… everything.” She tries not to rub it in; getting shot, letting the President escape with an extracted being with the potential to fracture time itself. 

“It is an honorary title,” the General says. “A War General in a time without war.” 

“But not a time of peace,” she remarks.

“No,” the General replies grimly, “I wouldn’t go so far.”

“Civil unrest?” Oswin asks jovially. “I was wondering why everyone’s hidden away inside. The city can’t be this empty.” 

“Don’t worry, it’s quite safe. The threat has been dealt with. The city is firmly under our jurisdiction. Others are not so fortunate.” 

Oswin smiles to herself, though the expression quickly sours. Her laugh is brittle. 

“You’re feeling sorry for yourself out here, living beyond the death of the universe itself, on borrowed time. Wallowing in self-pity,” she spits, trying not to think about the concept of projection. “Because you’re not just hated by the universe,” she adds, dispelling the unsavoury notion. “You’re hated by your own people, and no shake-up in the ranks is ever going to change that. It’s not going to change the way this place has always been, what it was built upon at the very, very beginning.” Inequality, exploitation, the terror of a stolen child. 

She wonders if John has obeyed her order, and stayed close by. She wonders if he has noticed the scorch marks and potholes, the frightened faces hidden in their crumbling homes. Does he see the irony that she does, in the red-robed rulers hidden high in the citadel, mining prophecies from deep beneath the earth? Does he see the joke, in the old stories they now turn to in revived superstition, in the rebellions they quell, and in the glory days they cite that only the elderly remember? 

Either the General does not listen or is ashamed to answer. Oswin hopes it is the latter that extends her rigid silence as they continue toward the convent behind the glass. 

They pass the tallest of the city’s buildings, cast in the waxy shadow of the glass. There is another gate, tall and plated with what looks like patchwork metal, unpolished, and here adorned with so much graffiti that the surface seems to swim with shades or red and black and silver. There is an added dimension to the paint and symbols, so that they swim from the surface and seem to inflict sensations of hatred and anger; a torch in hand, the rocket fire of a staser blast, grief like a storm. Still, Rigsy would put them all to shame.

The gates open but not, Oswin notes, automatically. Another pair of guards operates the mechanism on either side, and beyond them is a bridge across the chasm beneath. From the corner of her eye, Oswin glances down the abyss. Metal girders string between the central island and the surrounding mass like rafters or arches or sinew stretched between bones. Deep below, an odd flicker, a golden flash, the movement of a metal mass that grinds and spins, keeping the city alive. 

Oswin crosses the bridge, and as she does, she sees a flash of movement between the shining buildings ahead, the circular bases of the gilded towers reflecting something dark. There are no other pedestrians, which leads her to hope that her final order has been obeyed. Does she want him there for his sake – that he might discover something that will break his loyal resolve – or for her own?

Hope, vain and sentimental, is all she has. 

The operative walks through the broken city streets, led by a pair of broken city guards. 

The initial shock of arriving in this place began to subside throughout his journey from the TARDIS to the city gates, as Clara told him tales of a war he only half believed. Shock settles now to a slow, cold terror. Ice in his gut, stinging his teeth; this is Gallifrey. He takes in the ravaged streets with a flimsy veneer of indifference. A small-scale war has been fought here, and continues to be fought. He takes in the tarps draped over tunnels and turned over crates, the cryptic, angry symbols on the walls. Entrances to hideouts and dens and centres of trade, sprouting up in the chaos. In his time as an agent, he has been sent to quell rebellions, and to spark them. He has seen this landscape, drenched in these same throes of conflict, on many worlds. 

The guards walk further away from them than they should be, and every now and again they glance at one another nervously, and highly unprofessionally. Standards have slipped, then, in these desperate times. The operative keeps his back straight and his head trained forward, but allows his mind, for once, to wander. 

He can sense the lack of substance in the guards’ minds, lurking more deeply than the mask of emptiness put on by professionals – Division agents and Pythia. With a shudder, he realises how little a distinction there is, here at the end. Two forces, driven by visions of a future they attempt to parse, trying desperate to mould them. He isn’t sure how much of the thought is his own, and how much of the far-fetched analysis belongs to Clara. He still feels linked to her, in a way that makes bile rise acerbic in his throat. He can feel threads tugging at his joints like red, woollen hands. 

Her final piece of advice echoes; _watch closely._

He really, really would rather not, because he hates the way the air feels here, as if it’s pressing down on him with the potency of its nothingness. Time is not grey and dull and linear, it is nothing. Nothing like the blackness beyond the sky, and the light...

Dreams within dreams. He tries not to think about it. 

The operative looks up, and beyond the glass of the citadel he sees a pair of black desert birds wheeling through the sky, sharp-limbed and curled-beaked, snapping at one another. If they were closer, he might be able to hear their grating call. He remembers the disgusting creatures, the gnarled sort that lived off scaly carrion in the desert. The species was eradicated in the early ages of the empire, whether by force or by nature’s slow, ponderous selection, he cannot remember, but they were extinct, driven out in favour of animals kinder on the eyes, and better suited to the new biosphere. The old biosphere, as the stories said, though nobody could remember if the red grasslands and silver trees were a memory of generations passed, or a tale invented to break the oppressive monotony of the desert. 

Either way, created or recreated, it was beautiful. The war has transformed the planet, driven it back to what may or may not be its original, natural state. 

The operative has abandoned his professional example, and fixates upon the birds. There is something different about their shapes. They are elongated, their claws more sternly hooked. A new strain, perhaps a new species entirely, born from the nuclear wastes and toxic residue that simmered for decades after the war ended. Poisoned things that clawed from the ruins hungry, demented. He always hated those birds. The racket they made would drown out even the sounds of the machine, and the screaming beneath the ground of the other experiments, calling, reaching, screaming. 

He tries not to think about it.

It’s too hot. His jacket is equipped with a temperature regulator, so he knows this is impossible. Too many impossible things are happening, and he just wants to go back to the Division, complete his mission, get this sorry business mercifully wiped away and move onto the next. He just wants to go home. 

The operative is beginning to glean, from their continued nervous looks, that the guards are caught somewhere between fear and awe. Reverence, even. It doesn’t sit right, in fact, none of this sits right – this peculiar procession. The long walk through the city, the way they immediately separated Clara and himself, despite their shared destination, as if they are worried about keeping them together a moment longer than necessary. 

What troubles him most is the Matrix, in that he can barely recognise the stifling, suffocating presence. It offers no guidance or clarity; it is bloated, muttering beneath without coherency. It has gorged upon soldiers and their enemies alike, and grown wild, turned mad. It defends itself with an army of monsters, and rules the planet more than any council, any founder, this he can feel. It spews forth old superstitions, defies the order it once enforced, and reaches backwards along the structure it maintains, echoing across time. It is all cyclic. The algorithmic undulations and the flames. It all returns, literally, to dust, in the end. 

Is this what Clara wanted him to see, to understand? Did she think it would change his mind? 

It will not. It cannot. 

He tries not to think about it. 

This can’t be the fate of the place that was promised to him for so many years, in compensation for his terror. The place that he promised himself, in his semi-lucid dreams, when the pretty lies stopped coming, long after the eyes soured and even the scraps of care fled, leaving only raw determination. 

The legacy of the empire must be more than terror, more than a war that destroyed, and inspired hatred in the hearts of so many. 

And he _tries_ not to think about it – really would rather push it all out of mind, but the guards’ berth only widens as they walk, and the subterranean machine screams, and the birds overhead slash their jagged dark wings across the oil-slick shimmer of the suns, whose light still feels the same. 

If he were to _watch closely_ he would, by necessity, need to escape. This is inadvisable. He has no idea how to navigate this new city. The air alone makes him sick, with its thick smoke and stagnant time. The operative is bound to get lost in the streets, and he has no idea how many might be watching, what forces they might be able to call upon. But in his gut, he gets the feeling that the city is nearly empty. A rebellion quelled, and the survivors scattered or dead. He frames a growing plan as a series of logical jumps. 

They come upon the gates to the citadel. He remembers the polished steel surface of the wall, the way it seemed to melt away into the air in geometric folds that unfurled to allow passage over the gilded bridge, railed and paved in a burnished glass so reflective that it seemed as if you were walking in the sky. What he finds instead is a clunky, rusted gate, a footbridge that has clearly been destroyed and replaced with a placeholder of practical metal that has never been reengineered to mimic its former state. Clara must have come this way, or will be coming this way very soon, perhaps at one of the other bridges that ring the central dais. 

There is still a staser pistol fastened to his hip. 

Maybe these wounds run deeper than a memory wipe can fix. It certainly feels that way, from the attitude of his escorts. It is as if his unscrupulous origins are laid pair, and tied up with the dead girl, and cocooned in a thousand paradoxes. What if he is forever twisted? The operative is, for the first time in a long time, beginning to panic. Cut off from the network, no information comes to him save the ramblings of the new Matrix. It speaks in circular riddles and battle cries. The operative crosses to the other side of the bridge, and the gates to the city close behind him.

Maybe there is no hope for him now.

Maybe this is just what he tells himself, to make his disobedience feel easy, just the next logical next step. 

In the shadow of the towers, stunted by war, he gives himself an order.

Two short hip blasts from his staser, barely unhooking the mechanism from his belt. The guards might have had time to react if they had been standing closer to him, might have been able to read his intentions if they were accustomed to feeling the touch of time. It is a medium, through which thoughts swim. Without it there is not even a vacuum, nothing to pass through. Thoughts sit and fester within their shining-helmeted heads, that now drop towards the floor as their bodies slump to the dusty streets with a plasticky clatter. The founders symbol, unchanged over the eons, is emblazoned in white and gold upon their chest plates. They will awake in precisely one hour, if the measurement of seconds counts for anything in this place. The operative turns back, and slinks toward the side-streets, activating a rudimentary perception filter that he hopes will work against what has become of his own kind. He feels his way along the threads that hold him even now, connecting him to the human that claimed to be his friend, a long time from now, and a very long time ago. 

  
  


The door to the extraction laboratories slides up, a rusted metal sheet giving way to first a crack, then a plane of white beneath. Oswin knows that this is her last chance to make a run for it, despite her paralysed arms. Their stasers don’t work on her. She might even make it a few streets down before the soldiers catch up to her, slap a few more paralysing patches on her skin and haul her catatonic towards her demise. She dismisses the idea, and steps into the hall. The door shuts behind her with a hiss. 

Before the General can resume her commanding stride and lead them down the hall, one of the laboratory workers, clothed in a grating white cloak and matching hat, steps out of another hissing door that, once cleared, disappears into the texture of the wall once more. 

He looks up at the General in alarm. “Ma’am, I – I didn’t expect,” he trails off and smooths over his confusion with a pleasant smile. “The location has been tracked to an exact set of temporal coordinates. All gravitational anomalies accounted for. We’re ready to begin the extraction.”

“Excellent,” she replies dryly. “But I’m here for another matter, soldier.” The General steps aside, pointedly showing the prisoner standing behind her. Oswin gives him a smirk, and what would have been a lazy wave, if she could just persuade her muscles to cooperate. Instead, one arm twitches spasmodically behind her back. Strange, that she addressed him as soldier despite his white robes and clear employ within the laboratory. Maybe they are all soldiers.

“Oh, I see,” the man mutters, who Oswin figures might be called an extractor technician or time-meddling team leader. He glances between Oswin and the guards at her sides.

“By all means go on with the operation. Though I can’t see what good it will do.” The General lets out one of what Oswin is beginning to think of as a signature weary sigh, and leads her throng past the technician. 

“What are they doing?” Oswin asks the General, creeping forward a few steps. In her peripheral, she sees one of the guard’s hands rush toward his belt of paralysing patches. 

“Something inadvisable. I voted against it. Unfortunately the new officials are too young to remember… certain incidents.” 

“But they’re extracting someone?”

The General gives a noncommittal hum that Oswin takes for agreement. 

“Who?”

“A prisoner.”

“Still taking prisoners, are we?”

“Apparently so.” She looks tired. Overruled, decorated by virtue of age and respect, of high rank and past deeds, but nothing more. It doesn’t seem that her vote counts for much, at least. She’s like the old principal at Coal Hill, watching in dismay as the younger generations flew on through and started changing up his tried and true methods. 

“The extraction chambers get a lot of action then?”

“No,” the General replies, a touch of finality in her tone that tells Oswin no further answers will be given. 

She is led towards a patch of wall no different to the rest of the featureless, clinical plane. It melts away from the whole in a smooth, sliding motion that suggests a hint of the grand, magical civilisation she always imagined the Time Lords were. It is jarring, after the rusted gates and man-handled pulleys. Another war is being fought – and this notion she is sure comes from somewhere else, someone else, that is, per her advice, coming this way – between creators and machine. Gods and worshippers. It is a grapple for agency over the technology that pervades every aspect of the city’s existence, between the monstrous mind that grows, the disenchanted populace that fight, and the new, proud lords that continue, in spite of the evidence, to believe. Because there is a reason that no maintenance has been done. There is a reason these skirmishes have been fought with blaster and footsoldier, on the streets themselves. They can’t control the Matrix anymore. 

The task of rebuilding is too great to be carried out through manual labour, by a population so scattered, dwindling, divided. Their greatest threat is not time, fracturing by the force of one eternally extended life, nor the universe that craves revenge for the battle scars that remain, raw and eternal. The greatest threat to them now is the machine. 

Oswin is led into the extraction chamber, mulling over a mystery she doubts she will have the time to solve. 

It distracts her from the fear she should be feeling instead, as one of the technicians fiddles with a set of dials set into the blindingly white surface of the extractor controls. Is that why they’re snagging themselves another prisoner? Is it simply that they have wrangled control from the claws beneath for a brief moment, and are getting the most of their allotted turn with their toys? A small sliver of control clung to and exacted, just to prove they’ve still got it. 

But there are other questions running through her mind, questions like; why now? Why, after all this time, after the peak of their empire has long since passed – now, when they have the least control over the Matrix than they have ever had – has the Doctor’s secret been uncovered? There are forces at play here that she does not understand and, judging by the mechanical whine that thrums beneath her feet, never will. There is a blinding flash of white that screens in a snapping, jagged plane across the wall. A gateway is opened, roiling with static rivulets of primary colour. 

She finds that she still wants to know the answers, even if she will only know them for minutes, likely less. 

“General,” Oswin says, turning to the woman that watches over what may be her final, trailing loose end. A burnished stain upon her record of ruthlessness. “How did you find out about the Doctor?” Her voice sounds hollow and small, and maybe that is what awakens an ounce of reluctant sympathy in the ancient, blood-soaked creature. 

“It was buried deep within the Matrix, an encrypted message. Deeper than the Hybrid.” Part of her rigidity seems to soften. “I did not know. Nobody knew, not for millennia, and truly it is… regrettable.”

“Well, not really. It’s just typical. Characteristic. Nice work, you’ve outdone yourselves, but I know you’re smarter than that.” 

The General narrows her eyes. Her coldness has returned in full force. 

The technician positioned by the controls opens his mouth in protest. “Ma’am, it is dangerous for the window to be –” 

“Yes, yes. I am fully aware,” she grumbles. 

Oswin, with her hands already frozen behind her back, paces before the window of spitting light in a picture of deep thought. The light reaches for her, but she ignores it. 

“Okay, questions for the class,” – she looks up at the pair of guards by the door, the three technicians scattered at control panels throughout the room, and the General, a vein in her forehead rising to prominence. Attention well and truly captured, as if the answers would interest them very much indeed. “You said it was encrypted, undiscovered for millennia, but you lot can barely control the Matrix anymore. And it’s worse than a firewall that keeps its creators out, it’s been doing that for ages, you can’t even give it orders. Too many dead soldiers, too many enemy minds. It’s full, caput, overloaded and leaking out. So someone seeded the information there, left it for you to find, which led you to send for him to bring me back, which may or may not be totally unrelated, I mean look at me – I’m just riffing here,” she grins. “You said it was deeply buried, so, question one; who dug it up?”

“Nobody could have,” the General replies, irritated. The light snaps at Oswin’s ankles, singeing away the dust that coats her calves and clings to the canvas of her shoes, resetting her. Preparing her. “Besides, nobody did it was –

“Follow-up questions,” Oswin cries, and by the expression of the General’s face she guesses it has been far too long since she has been interrupted. “Who else was here, the day that the Doctor escaped the confession dial? Who turned up, inexplicably, against all planetary law, just to watch the fireworks? Who did the Doctor confide in as soon as he found out he was going to die? Who,” – she pivots on her heels, and glares directly at the General, – “would want that ancient truth to be uncovered?

The General looks bored, though it’s hard to know if it’s an act. “It is an interesting theory.” She nods toward the guards by the entrance, and Oswin again has cause to wonder if there’s something telepathic in the act. They step forward, red armour clacking. 

“Ah, actually It’s a very good theory,” Oswin replies, stepping backwards toward the panel of light. “You see, General, I know things that you don’t. Who would want this truth uncovered more than the remnants of the Pythia?”

“Right,” the General mutters, “I think it’s time we finished up, don’t you?” This time a hand is waved, a rigid flick. The technician by the controls spins a dial, and the white light behind Oswin takes form, the lightning sparks gathering, knitting themselves together into patterns of colour that fade from vibrancy to dull browns and blacks. 

“Haven’t you ever wondered where the prophecies come from?” Oswin says. Her voice trails to a whisper as the light arranges itself into the scene of her death. “They thought it was divine but… It’s all a circle. It’s infinite regress.” 

She sees Trap Street. The cobbled streets, the dim, yellow lamplight caught mid-flicker. Across the way, a man is frozen. He wears a maroon, velvet suit, and his eyes wide and rimmed red. It’s been so long since she’s seen his face. She sees Rigsy as well; just a hint of wide eyes from the window, young and shining with guilt. There is a raven poised in flight, streamlined, dark and sharp as a spearpoint. It shivers slightly in the air as it shifts, its outline fuzzy with bleeding colour. Oswin can see a place upon the street uncovered by dust, where the hay that has blown across the way is stamped down against the pavings by an invisible force. That is where the universe needs her to stand. 

She reaches one hand out toward the window and drags her fingers across its surface. The edges bleed into static reds and greens, particles dancing around her fingertips like pixels. The calling is stronger now, a force that drags her forward, like fate or, more likely, a mechanism of the extraction process, encouraging the subject to return their position of death without struggle. At the moment her hand brushes across the light, she feels the presence of someone else – like a cellmate, a fellow extension of the extractor machine, frozen in place, pulled from death. Someone else is here. 

Paranoid, she reminds herself. Paranoid, and recklessly hopeful. She pulls her hand back. 

“Look, just one more question for you, General, before I go.” Oswin smiles and looks back at the emotionless crowd. She allows herself a brief flash of sentimentality. These are her final moments, after all. 

“Who is the other prisoner?” The General looks blandly at her, but before she can make another inscrutable nod towards her guards, Oswin continues, “But never mind that – it’s just idle curiosity on my part. I suppose, the question you should be asking _yourselves_ is…” The panels of light upon the ceiling flash red, bathing the room in a soft pink glow. From outside the chamber, an alarm blares. Oswin shifts her gaze to the ceiling, her smile a hard, sharp line. “How good is your security?”

Panic perks up every guard and laboratory worker in turn, running between them like a current. The General presses her eyes shut, wincing as if nursing a migraine. 

Travelling alone, one has to learn to trust their own judgement, and she has a hunch, felt through the fingertips. It concerns phone numbers and newspaper adverts and dream crabs. 

One of the technicians opens the door, and the pair of soldiers rush out, followed by the General, her expression resigned. Again, a chance to escape, a chance to barge out and take her chances in the red flashing corridor, searching for the prisoner she hopes is there.

But there is someone outside the door, tucked to one side, peering around the corner with a perception filter buzzing around him that ignores her dead mind in its visual reflections. She told John to watch closely, and he has done as she said. He slinks across the threshold as the soldiers and the General exit. The sight is enough to make her hesitate, and miss her chance. The door melts back into place, and beside her, one of the white-robed technicians turns a dial on the surface of button panels and blue-tinted screens with the power to stop time, and to create organisms such as her. His movements are hurried, distracted by the alarms. Now would be the time for parting remarks, or profound thoughts. There is only one person she wants to talk to. John is looking at her with wide eyes – are they sympathetic, or just afraid? Either way, the vindictive satisfaction she was expecting to find upon his face is traceless. Oswin shakes her head minutely as if to say; do not help, do not interfere. 

It’s only a matter of time before they find him out, or he gives himself up. Will they punish him? Most likely they will simply follow through with the original plan. His purpose exhausted, they will return him to his original version of Gallifrey, re-tint the memories that have since surfaced poignant and painful, and erase the last few hours – but beyond that, someday, they will make him forget it all. Perhaps this is the day that his running starts. Today, or centuries from now, he will run, and they will make him forget he ever started. She thinks of the Doctor’s guilt, that weighed him down for so long. The delight he felt, upon saving his people, and the despair he felt, in his fruitless search for home.

Her anger blossoms anew; a bitter flame. 

An autumn leaf drifts from somewhere behind her and flows out onto the street. She watches it pass through the light, and shudder through the frozen air. 

“Listen, I’m going to give you some final advice. Properly final this time. Last words.” If the technicians were capable of rendering emotion, they might have looked confused. 

Oswin turns and looks John in the eyes. 

“Run,” she says, and smiles. The light that will kill her tickles her neck, hot, beckoning. “Run, you clever boy, and remember.” 

The leaf waits on the other side of the window, stalling for time. It flutters in a haze of red and yellow and blue. 

She follows it out onto the street.

Clara Oswald died on Trap Street, London, 2015. The street was empty, and she was alone, save for fear, a constant companion.

Agony, as every nerve and synapse in her body burned at once, torn through by dark, acrid smoke. She screamed, and the smoke trailed from her mouth in a final breath. When, as is customary, her life flashed before her eyes, she saw countless years’ worth of memories she had never experienced – those of a dead creature, and thousands of echoes. As she fell, a face stared at her from a nearby window. A stern face; a woman with dark eyes and pale blonde hair. Her jaw was set grim and her eyes sparkled with tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes notes notes
> 
> Regarding the first part. yeah. I am really not sure how it reads because I'm trying to do a lot of world-building that I already did in The Modern Prometheus (which I am still telling myself I haven't abandoned, even though it has been many, many months and I sort of hate it). But as a posthumous disclaimer, I don't know anything about deep Gallifreyan lore and I've never read any content about the Pythia outside the wiki page which, by the way, I think has been extensively edited since I came up with the world so the info is different now to what I started with ;-;  
> I just opened my little google doc and said ‘I am going to create a lore that is so unfounded’   
> But yeah, you will find no sterility curses or neo-technologists or actual oracles named Pythia here. I just took the name. But if you enjoyed that part you might enjoy... Modern Prometheus. Don't get invested though haha unless...  
> I wanted to sort of make it like, the story doesn’t quite make sense. Sounds like an excuse I Know. But they’re going on about ancient shadows, huge tainted cities with massive buildings and secrets but there’s also, like, a regular university campus with a surrounding residential village that seems quite normal. So where in the timeline did that happen?? Woahhh it’s craeeezy 
> 
> Second part I'm a bit iffy with the pacing, the first part especially is quite drawn out but I love Rigsy (and he wasn't going to be in this story at first but I've been rewatching and he's so precious, and I think it's been documented somewhere that he painted the TARDIS, which means they were reunited)  
> and the last part... I basically wrote this entire fic just for the last words Clara says to baby doctor so that was incredibly satisfying. I was telling myself, no you can't have the same twist two 100k+ stories in a row but you know what... I can. Somehow I keep making every story about the Matrix but that's only because it's so cool.  
> But I have accidentally created a hilarious situation where Missy and baby doctor are on Gallifrey at the same time and the potential there is… hmmm. Adorable and potentially angsty as hell. 
> 
> One more scene to come, which isn't strictly part of the story but I wanted to include it anyway, because what better way to tie off loose ends than to have a nice sit-down chat about them?


	7. [me]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“There will be no revenge. No one here, or anywhere else, will suffer.”_  
>  A tea party in heaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bonus scene!

She is a leaf in a storm. An autumn leaf tossed to shreds in the gale. By sheer force of will, she holds herself together, fights the scattering, the cataloguing, the sorting algorithm that parses over every bucketed aspect of her consciousness. She is information, but she’s been information before – as a stem still affixed to the tree before the wind tore her free. She is a cosmic anomaly being archived in the largest database in the universe, joining the throes of dead beneath the soil, and the microcosmic universe contained within its wild metal core. She is dead, but even so, a smile curls her lips. 

She forgets her name – never mind, it’s not important, because she knows what she has to do. She holds an image of searing violet in her eyes, because she was born to keep a promise.

As she falls, she thinks she hears a voice deep within the timbre. 

_Brace yourself,_ it says. _The bombs are soon to detonate._ The words are barely formed, dragged into semi-coherence from the computational rot below the catacombs, the foundations where a mountain once stood. 

She stops falling.

Miss Ravenwood stirs a fresh brew of dark tea in an ornate china pot. It sits upon a floral tablecloth, and other pieces gathered from assorted tea sets sit alongside, cramped upon the surrounding tables. Circular panels of thick glass with dark, iron-wrought frames and delicate chairs, long wooden banquet tables and cushioned benches, armchairs of all shades of leather – they stand side by side in a clashing assortment of aesthetics. 

The parlour smells of strawberries and thyme, and outside the ceiling-high arched windows, a garden sits in brittle quiet. Upon the lawn, autumn leaves are raked into perfect piles of red and brown and yellow. All the leaves have fallen, and the old oak trees are bare. Winter tinges the air with bitter chill, and frost covers the grass in a pale lime sheen. To Miss Ravenwood, it seems that autumn has lasted forever. 

There is a chime at the door as its handsome, glass-panelled surface swings forwards. Miss Ravenwood smiles as the Mistress enters the parlour. 

For a moment, the woman looks confused. She wears a purple skirt that falls wide and ruffled at her calves, a dark blouse adorned with yellow ferns, and a necktie patterned with flowers of red and white and orange. For a moment, the image shifts; the skirt is charred, its hem alight. The blouse is scorched and torn; the tie unravelled to a lank, tattered thing. For a moment, the Mistress looks confused, and gazes around at the parlour with its teacups and sweetcakes piled high, and the wintry scene outside. Her eyes, fire reflected within them, take in the face of Miss Ravenwood, and her confusion flows away as swiftly as the flames that part, and reveal a blue as pale and cold as the frozen pond outside. 

In the garden, snow is beginning to fall, and already it blankets the grass in a thin coating of soft white, blue tinged beneath the vibrant sky. This only seems odd for a moment. 

“Ah,” the Mistress smiles, coming toward the small, round table at which Miss Ravenwood sits. “I hoped it might be you.”

“Welcome to heaven,” Miss Ravenwood says. She stands from her place at the table, pushing her chair backward against the polished floorboards beneath. She bustles towards the Mistress who, right on cue, lurches on the spot, clutching her chest. Her fingers worm their way rigidly to a spot on her back. Miss Ravenwood hastens to her side and takes the Mistress’ arm supportively. 

“You got my message then?” Miss Ravenwood asks her.

The Mistress grimaces. “Evidently.” She straightens up and shakes off Miss Ravenwood’s grip with a wince. She walks with a softening limp in her step, as the pain of life is forgotten in their shared purgatory. “Are you enjoying the setting?” the Mistress asks as she sits upon the chair opposite Miss Ravenwood’s earlier position. “I constructed it on a whim as I passed through. An old configuration, but influenced by your fading subconscious,” she sweeps her arm broadly across the scene. Under the snow, the piles of leaves are collapsing to wet, mulched heaps. 

“Would you like some tea?” Miss Ravenwood asks brightly, bending over the table and reaching for an ornate teapot. It has a gilded handle, and its body is painted in soft blues and creams. 

The Mistress shrugs. “Why not.”

Obediently, Miss Ravenwood pours black forest tea into a pair of cups, each balanced upon mismatched saucers. 

“So, Clara, you seem unbothered by the idea of possessing a fading subconscious.”

“Right, yes,” Miss Ravenwood murmurs. “Clara.” She tries the name, but it doesn’t sound quite right; too short, too long, not beginning with the right letter. Dark tea overflows and spills over onto the saucer beneath. The liquid is strange, too thick, syrupy. She stares at it for a moment before she thinks to stop pouring. 

The Mistress chuckles, high-pitched and teasing. “Yes, fading indeed.” 

_Clara_. Details are beginning to return to her, bolstered, she is sure, by the Mistress’ presence. The environment around her begins to sharpen. Ravenwood was her mother’s name, but she’s always liked it better. It’s like a gothic heroine’s name. Sometimes she wonders if the universe is capable of playing pranks, and whether this is one of them. Coincidence seems far less likely than a universe that now wipes a tear of dying laughter on its cheek as if to say, _that was a good one._ A slow burner. 

Feeling newly solid, Clara sits opposite Missy at the table. 

The older woman’s eyebrows are raised expectantly. “Well – fading subconscious? Questions, comments?”

“Not really,” Clara shrugs. “I’m dead, so it makes sense.”

“Deader than dead, I’m afraid.” 

“And what about you?”

“Oh, don’t worry about me.” She winks. “Death is for other people.” She straightens her lank necktie as she says this, and for a moment reality flashes through, intrusive. The tie flits in a non-existent wind, stinking of mud and overheating machinery. 

“So, they finally dragged you back, did they?” Missy asks, bringing her teacup delicately to her lips. 

Clara isn’t sure, but from Missy’s tone garners that the answer is, “Yes.” In spite, she adds, “evidently.” The smell of burning is gone. In its place, as if the smoke of fading laser-fire has been taken and repurposed, a plate of scones appears. This is nothing of note. 

“Are you dead?” Clara asks.

“Frozen, like you were, but I’m working on it.”

In confusion, Clara looks down at her dress; dark and frilled and pinafored. She remembers a blue dress of a similar sort, and being a waitress. 

“Why am I dressed like this?” she asks Missy.

“Because it looks ever so fetching on you.” Her smile is sharp, her gaze penetrating. In an instinct that surprises her, Clara stares just as doggedly back. Missy is the first to break eye contact. She begins to stir an inordinate amount of sugar into her tea. 

“So then, dear, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Missy asks. “You call was rather urgent, pressing through the texture of the mass of clamouring minds. I swung through looking for an escape route a friend of mine told me about,” – she taps the side of her nose and smirks – “guess which one.”

“I need to tell you something,” Clara says bluntly. She remembers it being quite urgent, this promise she has made. 

“Oh? And what might that be.”

“I can’t say.”

With a pointed sigh, Missy takes another sip of her tea. Despite the sugar, her lips wrinkle at its bitterness. 

“Well, that _is_ a bit of a pickle.” She gazes up at the ceiling for a moment. The chandelier is reflected in her eyes, and then a dark sky dashed across with silver ships and falling missiles. “Any clues, anything at all? Is this a guessing game?”

“Well,” Clara sips her tea gingerly and takes the time to think. Concepts that were moments ago foreign to her are now tangible. The information offers itself up in logical sequence. Too logical, perhaps. A fading subconscious, just as Missy warned, degrading to a binary oscillation.

“I am a Matrix construct. A copy of a living mind stored in a database. Unfortunately, there are rules,” Clara says reasonably, with an apologetic shrug. “It’s encrypted, restricted. I can’t tell you. I can’t give you a single clue, none at all” – Missy pouts, and Clara leans back in her chair, folding her arms and fixing the Time Lord with a hardened glare – “but even if I could, I’m not sure that I would.”

“And why is that?”

Clara raises an eyebrow and reaches for a jar of strawberry jam that the ether has graciously offered up, noticing the dryness of the scones. “Why should I make it easy for you?”

Missy’s lips curl into an impatient grin. Clara can tell that she’s got her attention. 

“So then, self directed learning?” asks the Mistress.

“If you like.”

“Am I just supposed to guess? It’s impossible.”

“Ah ah,” Clara tuts. “Best to keep oneself in a growth mindset, that’s what I tell the kids.” She isn’t sure who’s kids she refers to – maybe someone in the manor. She vaguely recalls being a governess. “All I can promise you is this; you will know it when you see it.”

Missy wrinkles her nose, a playful snarl tinged with very real anger. “And what, I’m supposed to hang around. Get friendly with the wraiths. You do realise I’m on the run here. Out of the extraction chamber and straight into hell.”

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Clara murmurs. No – she always told her students to avoid cliches. She spreads jam on one of the scones, thick, timey-wimey. The snow outside is piling up at the doorstep, threatening to snow them in. 

“It’s only a matter of time before they catch up with me, or the creatures down here decide to absorb me into the transitorial mass. You don’t want that on your conscience, not among…” Missy grins, “Everything else.”

This angers Clara, though she can’t remember why. Waves of apathy, shores of empathy. The tide is high and the dunes are drowning. She doesn’t have time for mercy, not even a spare moment for the luxury of outrage. Her time is up. 

Missy grabs the jam slathered time-scone and takes a ravenous bite before Clara has the chance to prepare the second. “You could be a trick, Miss Ravenwood,” she says, swallowing. “A trap set to keep me here while the Time Lords figure out a way to catch me.” 

“Well yes, I suppose I could be.” Clara leans forward on her elbows and accidently knocks one of the teacups to the ground. It does not shatter. “But what if I’m not?” The teacup is full and unchipped. “Just stay awhile. Have a browse. Surf the web. I believe that you’ll find the information forthcoming.” 

Missy smiles flatly, and from her expression Clara knows that she has won. She looks at Clara with a curious mixture of annoyance and pride. “Look what’s become of you.”

“Just as you intended, I suppose you’ll say. It makes you look more of a mastermind.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret of my own then.” Missy leans forwards, and for a fleeting moment dirt flecks her face, and stray blade of artificial grass clings to her cheek. “I had no idea what I was doing.” 

“Did that feel good?” Clara asks.

“Not at all, but to ease your dying mind, I’d do anything.” Missy bows her head in a parody of demurity. She bats her eyelashes.

For a moment, they eat and drink in silence. It is almost peaceful. The windows are becoming brittle in the cold, and fault lines sprawl in frosted fractals across the glass.

“Why did they bother copying me?” Clara asks. “I’m not exactly important.”

“Oh, but you’re one of a kind,” Missy replies. “Maybe it’s for study. Professional curiosity. Timestreams are Matrix constructs after all. A cataloguing system, fed by a constant telepathic thread. It’s just basic record-keeping. It all comes back to this place,” she glances absently around the stuffy parlour. “It’s like… a linchpin. Pull it out and it’ll all slide right off the axel and go spinning down the proverbial road.”

“Sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“I’ve had an awfully long time to think.” 

A piano plays from the next room, but Clara ignores it. The falling snow creeps up, burying the first few inches of the door. The leaves have been crushed flat beneath its mass. 

“Must be on,” Missy says, drawing her chair back from the table. “I’ve got a professor to find and, apparently, a secret to discover before I do.” She stands, adjusting her skirts. 

“So you’ll look?”

Missy gives her a drawn-out, deeply sarcastic curtsey. “Only because you asked so prettily.”

Clara scowls, but a weight is lifted from her shoulders. A part of her that she cannot remember seems sure that Missy will know what to do. 

“And you’re sure you can’t stay a moment longer?” Clara asks, a hint of desperation in her voice. Fear betrays her, it’s humiliating, though she can’t quite remember why she cares. Somewhere that she cannot see, a clock is ticking down.

“You’re a fading oscillation,” Missy says, a touch of sympathy in her tone that doesn’t at all suit her. “A synaptic explosion captured at the moment of your death slowly whittling away to binary soup.”

Clara shrugs. “You make a fair point.” 

“Then c'est la vie. Don’t burn the place down while I’m gone. And if you are some sort of trick,” – she points an accusatory, chipped-manicured finger – “I’ll be extremely cross.” And Clara can see the impression of it in her eyes already, a premonition of anger to come. It will be apocalyptic. Black, infernous, world-ending. She has cause to wonder whether she has done the right thing, but then she remembers the sea – the great tsunami that has left the shore decimated – and knows that she has. 

Her better judgement tells her that revenge is wrong. After all this time, she’s gotten rather good at telling it to sod off. 

“Yes, I expect you will be,” Miss Ravenwood replies amicably, airly. A little too late. Already, she feels her conviction fading. She is just a set piece, a construct, fading into the background. 

Something like regret flashes across the Mistress’ eyes. Something like it, Miss Ravenwood reasons, but not quite the thing itself. There is too much anger on the surface, and the yellow glint of a laser blast. 

“You’ve done well, Clara,” the Mistress says as she steps towards the door. 

In her confusion, it is all she can do to smile. 

The Mistress opens the glass-panelled doors to the courtyard without touching them, and it pushes the gathering layers of snow away in an explosion of white. She steps out into the garden, woefully underdressed, to face the now torrential blizzard beyond. 

Miss Ravenwood continues to smile as the Mistress fades into the mist, and wraps her hands around the teacup in front of her. The heat of the china singes her palms, and she grips it tightly and for long enough that it should burn. It does not. 

Instinctively, she holds her fingers to her radial artery, and feels her pulse drum persistent, comforting. She feels as if she has been reunited with an old friend.

Slowly, the room fades. The tea, when she takes her final sip, is bland and lukewarm. Her last bite of jam scone is dry and tasteless. The snow is halfway up the windows, and spilling into the parlour through the open door. The wind howls, but the piled tea sets stand undisturbed, as if glued together in an amorphous mass. The lines between each pot and cup and saucer grow indistinct, colours bleeding to a cement grey as their shapes melt. The room slides out of focus. 

Her thoughts become –

Monotonous as the parlour slips into hollow, metallic black.

Someone somewhere is searching. This is against protocol. 

Deep beneath the centuries of accumulated minds, the mass graves, the computational rot, a familiar voice rings. It is counting down –

To zero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAAAAAAAA now it's done for real! (barring edits)  
> You know the rest of the story :/  
> Thanks for reading! I've learnt a lot from this, mostly that I don't know how to pace things and seriously underestimate both how many words a story is going to take to tell and how long it will take to write them all. This is the second longest thing I've ever written and the longest finished thing I've ever written so it's been good! I think I waffle, and have conversations go on too long for the sake of it, and altogether rely too much on people talking for ages without doing anything, and mixed metaphors, and self-indulgent callbacks, and long sentences like this one, but it's dooooone.  
> I never even want to think about Clara again smh. I've said all about her that I want to say. Like Moffat really thought he had made her so crucial to the Doctor's story and I said 'hold my beer' and here we are ;-;  
> Please comment I'm starving :)))))  
> also I'm going to do a big edit and format this as a pdf with little pictures and all that... eventually. Might take a breather from it.

**Author's Note:**

> basically no more of this is written rip
> 
> Comment if you enjoyed, I'd love to hear from you <3


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